Research

In his research, Dr. Solano-Flores has focused on three main areas, assessment development, the testing of linguistic minorities, and the process of test translation and test adaptation in international comparisons. Most of this research work has been funded by the National Science Foundation.

Assessment Development
Dr. Solano-Flores has conducted research on the development of science and mathematics assessments for elementary schools and the construction of tools for generating science and mathematics tasks. His work on the process of test development as critical to addressing linguistic and cultural diversity has produced two major outcomes. One outcome is the concept of cultural validity, which refers to the extent to which the process of test development takes into account cultural diversity throughout the entire process of test development. Another outcome is the finding that engaging bilingual teachers in developing tests concurrently in two languages allows them to give deep consideration to culture and language in their thinking about tests and the characteristics of their students.

Testing of Linguistic Minorities
Dr. Solano-Flores has conducted research on the testing of linguistic minorities that addresses the fact that current testing practices and policies are not well grounded on knowledge from the field of linguistics. In his recent publications, he reports research on the use of generalizability theory as a tool for examining language as a measurement error in the testing of linguistically diverse populations. One major outcome of this research work is the finding that the performance of English language learners in tests is very unstable across languagesówhich implies that testing English language learners only in English or only in their native languages may not always produce valid measures of their academic achievement.

Test Translation and Test Adaptation
Dr. Solano-Flores has conducted research involving international test comparisons. He has investigated how test translation and adaptation can be improved to produce more valid measures of academic achievement for students who are tested in different languages or who have different cultural backgrounds. As a part of that research work, Dr. Solano-Flores is developing a conceptual framework for test translation review which examines translation error on several dimensions that include semantics, register, and curriculum representationóaspects of translation not usually considered in current testing translation practices.