Nice article this month in Language Testing Journal about the creation of an in-house EAP placement test at the University of Iowa which utilizes integrated assessment. It notes that this was necessitated in part due to dissatisfaction with an earlier placement test that focused only on isolated skills. The article cites some ETS research about the improved predictive validity of integrated assessment.
The Iowa test is quite a beefy affair: the test taker consumes two 900-word articles and a 10-minute lecture on a singular topic, answers questions about them, and finally produces a piece of writing that draws on all three sources. That is all followed by a live conversation on an unrelated topic.
I wonder if we might see more of this in American schools over the medium and long terms.
Many people feel that responses to integrated tasks based on academic material hint at a student’s ability to do academic work and achieve desired outcomes. That seems to be the opinion of the authors of this article. Indeed, the University of Iowa waives the placement test requirement for students achieving over 100 on the TOEFL iBT… and seemingly never does so for students who get admitted with Duolingo scores.
The inclusion of such tasks on the TOEFL starting in 2005 is a big part of why it is now such a dominant assessment product in the USA. Note that marketing materials produced by ETS as recently as last year reference this feature as the number one reason why TOEFL is the most accepted English-language assessment in the world.
But these tasks will all be removed from the TOEFL in January. At that point, score users who have bought into the idea that integrated tasks which utilize lengthy academic sources have some extra-special predictive validity may desire in-house testing solutions to supplement scores used for admissions and better provide the support (EAP and otherwise) that students may need to thrive at their institutions.
Interestingly, the third-party placement test solutions I’m familiar with (College Board’s “Accuplacer ESL,” Michigan Assessment’s “Michigan EPT” and ETS’s own “TOEFL ITP”) are not particularly fantastic. They test isolated skills, mostly in a multiple choice format. I’m not sure score users would find them any more useful than the tests they are already using for admission.
Maybe this represents a possible revenue stream for ETS. Remember that the existing TOEFL ITP mostly consists of recycled test forms from the old PBT format that was phased out between 2005 and 2017. Perhaps in 2026 the ITP product could be rebooted to focus on test forms from the current IBT product. That could make it a more attractive option for score users who believe in the predictive validity of integrated assessments based on academic material.