Sahara Gray

Teacher's Guide: Santillana English Benchmark Assessments (SEBA)

[This is a brief excerpt from a teacher’s guide written under contract for Santillana, USA. This section describes the capabilities of the assessment system.]

Santillana English Benchmark Assessemnts (SEBA) provide a flexible, complete system for assessing student progress in English proficiency, so that teachers and administrators can tailor their instructional plans to address the evolving needs of English language learners. The system is firmly based in nationally recognized standards developed by both Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and the State of California. This system is designed to help educators maximize their students’ potential for learning English before having to conduct a high stakes assessment which could affect eligibility for services and funding. Results provided by SEBA can impact both teacher in-service covering relevant instructional methods, and materials acquisition for implementing those methods. Teacher in-service may be guided by these results by pointing out priority needs for different students. Thus teachers can plan accordingly, beginning with the need to schedule staff development necessary to meet the specific needs of all their students. This in-service ideally could involve people at several levels of the school community, including not only teachers, but also administrators, paraprofessionals, parents, and school volunteers. The acquisition and/or development of instructional resources to implement a sufficiently rich curriculum to meet every student’s needs would hopefully be closely tied to this in-service. These materials might start with Santillana Intensive English (SIE) kits, but could also include other developmentally appropriate materials such as computer software, manipulative materials, and rich, extensive classroom and school libraries with developmentally appropriate materials.

Most of the high-stakes tests used for accountability purposes under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) are nationally normed and offer an array of scoring and reporting options (such as total scores, levels, normal curve equivalents, and percentile ranks). SEBA is not intended to be used for high-stakes accountability purposes, and thus has not been nationally normed, and has not undergone a rigorous statistical analysis, which would yield item-scale correlations, and a standard error of measurement. Similarly, SEBA does not allow for calculating total scores across all the different subtests, or reporting scores in the variety of ways mentioned above. Therefore, SEBA should not be used to address federal funding requirements, student placement, or replace annual testing by instruments such as the Language Assessment Scales (LAS), the IDEA Proficiency Test (IPT), or the Stanford English Language Development (SELD) test. However, the SEBA system should be used to help prepare for these tests. This system thus has the potential to help all educators of ESL students design and implement programs to maximize the learning potential of everyone involved.