Examining the Construct of Proficiency in a University's American Sign Language (ASL) Program: A Mixed-Methods Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
American Sign Language (ASL) has become increasingly popular as a second language option at universities and colleges in North America.While a growing number of hearing, adult learners are enrolling in ASL classes, this has not been paralleled (yet) by an equal development in ASL research.There has been insufficient investigation into what constitutes ASL proficiency development and how proficiency can be validly and reliably assessed for this group of learners.This mixed-methods study explores the ASL program at a Canadian university.It investigates the construct of proficiency from three angles: instructors' understanding and definitions of ASL proficiency; how student proficiency is determined through current assessment practices and; student responses to assessment practices.Results of this study suggest that in this context ASL proficiency is not clearly defined.Without a clear construct definition, what current ASL assessments are actually measuring is unknown, and consequently may not be providing valid results.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.025 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".