Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Psychology (Ph.D.)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Samuel Ortiz

Second Advisor

Dawn Flanagan

Third Advisor

Marlene Sotelo-Dynega

Abstract

The United States population continues to shift towards a majority rich in cultural, ethnic, and linguistic minorities (Rhodes et al., 2005). Within the education system, school psychologists are challenged with the task of conducting nondiscriminatory assessment of English Learners (ELs), while also adhering to the standards for ethical practice. In recent years, minority students have too frequently been placed in special education settings without sufficient support to signify need of a classification. To provide equitable and fair assessments to ELs in schools, clinicians require the knowledge necessary to understand the influence of cultural and linguistic developmental factors that affect performance. The Culture-Language Interpretive Matrix (C-LIM) and its respective test classifications were developed as an interpretation tool to promote an understanding of the degree of cultural and linguistic loading present in standardized assessments. Most recently, the development of the Diverse-Student Normal Ability Performance (D-SNAP; Ortiz & Pristo, 2023) provides a new framework that builds upon the principles of the C-LIM and allows practitioners to evaluate the impact of cultural and linguistic differences on test score validity at the composite and broad ability level. The current study seeks to evaluate the degree of consistency between expected scores from the D-SNAP and the actual scores obtained from the cognitive assessment of ELs.

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