Dialect and mathematics performance in African American children who use AAE: Insights from explanatory IRT and error...

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, in part because research paradigms with African American English (AAE) dialect speakers face complex challenges in measurement, historical exclusion, and other social, economic, cultural, and linguistic confounds. 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 2^nd and 3^rd 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. Research designs that look beyond correct/incorrect scoring to examine qualitative patterns of performance in AAE speaking children can provide valuable and oft-overlooked evidence when considering equity in mathematics assessment formats.