Date/Time
Date(s) - 09/26/2019
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Location
3108 JKB
Category(ies)
Associate Professor, Greg Thompson will present for the Humanities Center’s weekly colloquium on Thursday, September 26. The presentation will be held at 3:00 PM in room 4010 JFSB.
Title: “How foreign are the Advanced Placement world language exams? The case of ethnicity, bilinguality, and heritage learner candidates”
This presentation discusses the evolution of Advanced Placement (AP) exam candidates’ ethnic and racial background and, in the case of world language exam candidates, their heritage learner status and language dominance. The results come from data sets prepared by the College Board that include ethnicity, score, and exam taken from 1979 to 1993 as well as gender, heritage learner status, and language dominance for the years encompassing 1994-2014. The results found that of the 34 AP exams given in 2014, four of the top five exams with the most ethnically diverse candidates were the world language exams. For four of the seven modern language exams other than English, 74% or more of candidates identified their ethnic and racial background as something other than White/Caucasian. The results of these analyses show how an ever-increasing diversity in the candidates who take the AP world language exams needs to be considered from a programmatic level as well as in designing future assessments for these students. This diversity should impact all levels of the AP world language exam program, from the design of AP course syllabi and curricula to classroom pedagogy to the construction, scoring, and norming of the exams.
