Pictorial Items with a Second-Language Reader
Ms. Ruiz administers five pictorial items one at a time to Theo, age eight, who has been learning English for eight months. On each item he points to a picture and then explains his choice.
Item 1: umbrella, raincoat, boots, sled - 'Which does not belong with a rainy day?' Theo chooses sled. Correct.
Item 2: cup, bucket, bathtub, ladder - 'Which does not belong?' Theo chooses bathtub, saying, 'You cannot carry it.' The keyed answer is ladder.
Item 3: a glove beside a hand, then a boot beside foot, leg, sock, shoe. Theo chooses foot. Correct.
Item 4: hammer, saw, bucket, spade - 'Which does not belong?' Theo says, 'The spoon digs,' and chooses bucket. The keyed answer is bucket, because the other three are hand tools.
Item 5: four pictures of a candle burning down, then four choices for the next picture. Theo describes the row right to left - 'first the big candle, then the little candle' - and chooses the tallest candle.
1. Sort the three questionable responses (items 2, 4, and 5) into reasoning, picture or word decoding, and task format, and say what each implies for his score.
Read the worked answer
Item 2 - reasoning. 'You cannot carry it' is a real rule, and it does isolate exactly one picture. It is weaker than the intended 'holds water' rule, but it is not a decoding failure and not a format problem. Treat the item as ambiguous: record it, but do not read it as evidence that his classification reasoning is weak until it is re-asked with the portability feature removed.
Item 4 - decoding only. He called the spade a spoon, yet described its function correctly ('digs') and chose the right picture. The vocabulary slip did not affect the answer. Score it correct and note the mislabel: on a picture test taken in a second language, naming errors can depress scores without touching reasoning.
Item 5 - task format. He read the row right to left, so his ordering was internally consistent but anchored at the wrong end. This is not a failure of sequence reasoning; it is an unstated convention about direction. Do not score it as a reasoning error - re-administer with an explicit left-to-right cue.
2. Choose one change to make before re-administering, and justify it against the purpose of the test.
Read the worked answer
Change the delivery, not the items. Before the sequence items, give a practice row and sweep a finger left to right while saying 'we read this way.' Before the vocabulary-loaded items, confirm what he calls each picture and accept his label if the function is right.
Justification: two of the three problems (items 4 and 5) are about access - vocabulary and an unstated convention - rather than reasoning, and the test exists to measure reasoning. Keeping the same items preserves comparability with the norm, whereas substituting easier pictures would change what is being measured and make his score uninterpretable.
What not to do: do not translate the items unless the manual permits it, and do not coach on the specific content of items already seen. A direction cue and a naming check are procedural, not instructional, so they do not contaminate the result.
Watch item 2 separately: his answer there is a genuine reasoning choice, so it needs an item fix rather than a delivery fix.
3. Rewrite item 2 so that the intended rule is the only defensible one, and state the general principle you used.
Read the worked answer
Revised item: cup, bucket, jug, ladder - 'Which does not belong?'
Why it is now unambiguous: the intended rule ('holds water') points to ladder, and the alternative rule Theo actually used ('things you can carry') now also points to ladder, because a cup, a bucket, and a jug are all carryable. The bathtub is gone, and with it the only picture that could be excluded by portability.
General principle: ambiguity is not removed by adding clues or by telling the child which feature to notice. It is removed by making every plausible rule land on the same answer. Test the item by asking, for each remaining picture, whether any obvious rule would exclude it - if one picture can be excluded by a rule that ignores your intended feature, the item is broken, not the child.
Check before use: confirm that the jug is not so large in the drawing that a child could argue it is not carryable, since that would reintroduce the same ambiguity in a new place.