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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Higher Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1521482
The Role of Motivation in Literacy Assessment: Using Item-Level Analyses to Inform College Placement for Multilingual Learners
Provisionally accepted- 1Georgia State University, Atlanta, United States
- 2University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee, United States
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Purpose: College placement assessments often overlook multilingual learners' full linguistic abilities and literacy engagement, as standardized tests primarily assess English proficiency rather than how students interact with academic texts. Directed Self-Placement (DSP) offers an alternative approach through self-assessment, with some models incorporating post-task selfratings of students' competence beliefs. However, this approach does not fully capture how motivation (i.e., competence beliefs and task value) interacts with varying literacy skills within a task. This exploratory study applies Explanatory Item Response Models (EIRMs) to examine how self-rated motivation relates to vocabulary performance on low-and higher-frequency words, offering insights to refine DSP frameworks for multilingual learners.Method: A total of 39 multilingual learners and 249 monolingual English-speaking college students completed a vocabulary assessment and responded to self-report motivation scale questions assessing their reading motivation. Item-level analyses were implemented to examine the interaction between motivation and multilingual learner status on higher-and lowerfrequency words.Results: Lower-frequency words posed greater challenges across all participants but disproportionately undermined the performance of multilingual learners with lower reading confidence. However, multilingual learners with higher motivation performed comparably to monolingual English speakers on both higher and lower frequency words.EIRM-based analyses offer novel insights into the ways that motivation interacts with different dimensions of literacy performance at the item level. Future research should develop validated self-assessment tools that incorporate additional aspects of motivation and multilingual learners' linguistic strategies, which could be informative on ways to incorporate more equitable placement practices.
Keywords: multilingual learners, Directed Self Placement, reading motivation, vocabulary, explanatory item response models
Received: 01 Nov 2024; Accepted: 17 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kaldes, Braasch and Kessler. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Gal Kaldes, Georgia State University, Atlanta, United States
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