Dialect and Mathematics Performance in African American Children Who Use AAE: Insights from Explanatory IRT and Error Analysis

Abstract

Little is known about mismatches between the language of mathematics testing instruments and the rich linguistic repertoires that African American children develop at home and in the community. The current study aims to provide a proof of concept and novel explanatory item response design that uses error analysis to investigate the relationship between AAE child language and children’s mathematics assessment outcomes. Here, we illustrate 2nd and 3rd grade children’s qualitative patterns of performance on arithmetic tasks in relation to their AAE dialect use and elaborate a unified framework for examining child and item level linguistic characteristics. Results suggest that children draw upon their emerging (bi)dialectal repertoire with arithmetic problems when selecting appropriate problem-solving strategies on language-formatted problems. The mismatch of assessment language formatting with children’s repertoires may disadvantage AAE speakers’ strategy selections and result in a language-based performance disadvantage unrelated to mathematical ability.