The exit decision in intensive English programs: high-stakes decision making in a local assessment context
Creators: name: Green, Ashley
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2022

description: In many U. S. universities, international students whose second language is English follow one of two admission paths: 1) the traditional admission path, where students apply directly to the university for full admission; or 2) the conditional admission path, where they can apply to the university’s intensive English program (IEP) and be granted full admission to the university upon completion of the program. For students who apply directly to the university, admissions officers generally rely on scores from standardized language proficiency tests, like the Test of English as a Foreign Language® (TOEFL®), the International English Language Testing System™ (IELTS™), or the Duolingo English Test, to determine if students have sufficient English proficiency. The evaluation of the English proficiency of students who matriculate from the university’s IEP, however, is an exit decision made by faculty and staff within that program.This dissertation employed a multiple case study design to examine how the exit decision-making process unfolds in three IEPs across the United States. The research drew on a validity framework to assess the coherence and logic of the decision-making process and to evaluate whether decisions in these three programs are being made appropriately. Unlike typical approaches to validation that focus on the use of an assessment instrument (Bachman &amp; Palmer, 2010; Kane, 2006, 2013; Messick, 1989), this validity framework also incorporated a data use perspective (Coburn &amp; Turner, 2011; Moss, 2013, 2016) to make sense of the complexity of high-stakes decision making in a local assessment context where multiple sources of evidence are used and multiple people contribute to the decision at various stages.Data collection involved: 1) interviews with parties directly engaged in and impacted by the exit decision-making process in order to understand how the process unfolds, the outcomes of this process, and the contextual factors that shape decision making; and 2) the collection of relevant documents that show how key stages of the decision-making process are codified and communicated. An a priori coding scheme was developed from the conceptual framework and iteratively expanded to incorporate emerging insights from the data. Cross-case analysis was employed to identify major themes within the data.Findings reveal that all three IEPs have designed thoughtful and robust exit decision-making processes that include close collaboration among program faculty and staff; ongoing support to enable quality instruction and assessment practices; and cycles of inquiry that allow for improvements to the decision-making process. Furthermore, these exit decision-making processes align with institutional requirements and respond to changes in the broader institutional environment while promoting student success. All of the evidence supports the validity of exit decisions in these programs. Especially as test-optional admissions policies become more common (Buckley et al., 2018), the validity framework proposed in this dissertation can provide a useful conceptual toolkit for examining high-stakes decisions that rely on evidence beyond test scores.