Ontological realism as a validity criterion in second-language strategic competence assessment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Strategic competence, conceptualized as the ability to put semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic knowledge into use, is a key element in models of communicative language proficiency but remains a difficult construct to assess in language tests. In the oral proficiency interview (OPI), strategic competence is typically assessed through the use of role-plays with a complication. Assessment of test-taker performance on the role-play is subjective and is contingent on raters accurately identifying interactional evidence of strategic competence. Accordingly, validation of the strategic competence exhibited in role-plays has been mostly interpretive. To obtain evidential support for an interpretive argument that role-plays can indeed isolate and provide assessment evidence of strategic competence, the criterion of ontological realism is applied in this study. Towards that end, eleven samples of English-as-a-foreign-language OPI role-plays with a complication were judged by 52 untrained English native speakers. Evidence in support of the ontological validity of assessing strategic competence via role-plays is presented through analyses of the untrained raters’ judgments, augmented by quantitative analyses that identify sources of variation among the raters, including a post-study additional round of coding in which the notion of “success” in the role-plays was examined more granularly than can be done with dichotomous decisions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 teacher head, 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".