Abstract

Considerable attention has been given to ethical issues in language testing since the 1990s, with several special issues, volumes, and international conferences dedicated to fairness and justice in assessment (Davies, 1997, 2004; Kunnan, 2000; McNamara, Knoch, & Fan, 2019). In this chapter we review existing work, focusing on how ethical issues can arise at any stage of the assessment process — from initial test development through test administration, test scoring, and test use. Each of these four stages requires different quality control procedures to ensure fairness and ethical standards, namely, (1) fairness review during test development; (2) accommodations during test development; (3) bias analysis after test scoring; and (4) communication with stakeholders about ethical test use. Informed by ethical codes of practice created by language testing associations (e.g., the International Language Testing Association (ILTA) Code of Ethics), we provide specific examples to show steps that can be taken in each phase to ensure that ethical standards are upheld. Examples of ethical issues and the corresponding quality control procedures in this chapter are taken from a local, university-based English speaking test in the US. While some of the quality control procedures require language or pedagogy-related content expertise, others require specialized knowledge and skills in measurement and statistics. Finally, we conclude by recommending best practice to guide test developers and test users. We argue that assurance of ethical standards in language testing requires collaboration between language testers and other stakeholders.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationEthical Issues in Applied Linguistics Scholarship
EditorsPeter I De Costa, Amr Rabie-Ahmed, Carlo Cinaglia
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company
Chapter13
Pages235-248
ISBN (Electronic)9789027246332
ISBN (Print)9789027218971, 9789027218179
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 21 2024

Publication series

NameResearch Methods in Applied Linguistics
Volume7
ISSN (Print)2590-096X

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