Avant Newsletter: February 2017
AVANT NEWSLETTER
February 2017
IN THIS ISSUE:
How Does Avant Rate Speaking and Writing Responses? – White Paper
The Avant Blog
News and Events
HOW DOES AVANT RATE SPEAKING AND WRITING RESPONSES?
David Bong, Avant CEO
Avant Assessment is proud of the quality of our assessments and the rigor and reliability of our system for rating them. In this White Paper we outline the processes that Avant utilizes for the human rating of student responses to both speaking and writing prompts on the Avant STAMP and PLACE tests: who rates the tests; how they are trained and certified; how Avant ensures Inter-Rater Reliability; and how the final Avant STAMP and PLACE scores are determined. We have worked for many years to develop and refine our comprehensive online Rater Connection system and are happy to compare it with the rating system of any other language assessment organization. We welcome any questions that you have.
NEWS AND EVENTS
NEWS
We continue to improve our assessments and support materials, and expand the number of languages that we assess. Here are a few of the things that we have been working on:
Helping heritage Spanish and Chinese Learners succeed on Avant STAMP
In response to requests from our customers for ways to help heritage learners succeed on the Avant STAMP assessment in languages where there are a large number of heritage learners, we have added Spanish and Chinese language translations alongside the English prompts to our STAMP assessments. Grade 2 to 6 students taking Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, and Cantonese STAMP 4Se assessments can read and listen to the prompts for Speaking and Writing in both English and the target language. Grade 7 and above students taking the Spanish or Mandarin Chinese STAMP 4S assessments can listen to the prompts for Speaking and Writing in the target language as well as read them in English.
Helping heritage Spanish Learners perform at their best on the Avant Spanish Heritage Language (SHL) test
The Avant SHL test is designed to place heritage Spanish learners into the appropriate Spanish language course in grades 7 to 16. In order to assure that we are only measuring the learner’s skills in Spanish and not in the ability to read directions in English, we have converted all of the directions to Spanish and now the test taker can read either the English or Spanish directions for each test section.
Avant STAMP Results – National Averages 2016
Curious about how your Avant STAMP scores compare to others across the country?
The National Average Avant STAMP Results from the 2015-2016 academic year represent the nearly 65,000 test takers from schools across the United States and a number of international schools around the world for which we had adequate data on years of study to use in this report. The data for results in Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking are included in this report and organized by level (Elementary, Secondary, and Higher Ed) and by language in alphabetical order. To view or download the full report click here:
Avant STAMP Results – National Averages 2016.
WHERE YOU WILL FIND US!
Avant is an active partner in the World Language community. You will find us exhibiting/presenting at the following conferences:
SWCOLT – Southwest Conference on Language Teaching 2017 Annual Conference in Oklahoma City, OK, March 2-4, 2017.
CSCTFL – Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in Chicago, IL, March 9-11, 2017.
SCOLT – Southern Conference on Language Teaching in Orlando, FL, March 16-18, 2017.
CABE – Calif Association for Bilingual Education in Anaheim, CA, March 29 – April 1, 2017.
You can now find Avant’s full schedule of events for 2017 by visiting the Events tab on our website. Do you have a conference or workshop you would like Avant to attend? Send us a message with the details – 