Language Minorities’ Performance

On the

Maine Education Assessment: 1999-2000

The Maine Educational Assessment (MEA) was originally implemented in 1985 as result of the Educational Reform Act of 1984. The MEA has been redesigned to align with Maine’s Learning Results which challenge schools and students to pursue academic standards which are among the highest in the nation. As you review the results from this baseline year, please keep in mind that these results represent the benchmark for measuring school and language minority student progress over the next decade.

The revised MEA is composed of selected-response (multiple-choice), short-answer, and complex questions that require students to construct answers that demonstrate their knowledge and skills.

The scores are reported using a numerical scale (501-580) and performance levels of Does Not Meet Standards, Partially Meets Standards, Meets Standards, and Exceeds Standards.

The scale and the performance levels will remain fixed for a period of at least five years to measure progress of students across the State in achieving the standards. It is important to know that more than 500 teachers and other educators from across Maine helped to develop the new MEA and assisted in the scoring and standard-setting process. This participation has not only strengthened the redesigned MEA but has also engaged teachers from around the state in conversations about quality standards for student work.

Grade Levels Assessed Annually

Grades 4, 8 and 11

Content Areas Assessed

Reading, writing, mathematics, science and technology, social studies, the visual & performing arts and health education

Construction and Administration

• Implemented in 1995 as an open-response format.
• Test content was reviewed by an advisory committee.
• The test in each of the areas of science, social studies, health and arts and humanities consist of 24 open-response questions.
• Four performance levels in reading and math were established by the student-based constructed-response methods.
• Percentages of students at different performance levels are reported for each subject area tested.
• Writing is measured by direct writing assessments (i.e., writing samples in response to prompts). The Annotated Holistic Scoring Method was used to evaluate students’ writing papers. The two readers of each paper identified up to two evaluative statements or annotations addressing noteworthy traits of the paper. The annotations reflect either “Commendations” or “needs” pertaining to the analytic traits of topic development, organization, details, language/style, sentences, grammar and usage, and mechanics. The writing section reports the number and percentage of students in the school, district and state receiving commendations or needs for each of the seven analytic traits. A student receiving more than one commendation or need for a particular element is counted only once in the determination of these data. The actual annotations appear on the Annotated Holistic Scoring Guide distributed with the student level results.
• Detailed evidence of the MEA’S quality of reliability and validity is available on request.

Identification of Language Minority Subgroups

• Monolingual children – children whose communicative competence is limited to English.
• Bilingual English fluent – children whose communicative competence extends to two or more languages; English skills of reading, writing, speaking, and listening are at cognition levels equivalent to English-only students of comparable academic standing and maturation.
• Limited English proficient students – communicative competence in English is limited in at least one of the following: reading, writing, speaking, or listening.
• Identification of language minority students is at the discretion of each school’s MEA Administrator.

	Grade 4	Grade 8	Grade 11	Totals
LEP Student Participants included in MEA Testing	81	66	80	227
LEP Students Excluded From MEA Testing	46	34	49	129

Language Minority Subgroup Results

• Graphs on the following pages reveal the performance of language minority subgroups tested on the MEA.