Understanding WIDA Scores

The WIDA Consortium is an educational consortium of of state departments of education. They create most of the assessments that we use in Massachusetts to assess English Learners: The WIDA Screener, the W-APT, the MODEL, and the ACCESS for ELLs. Scores for most of these tests are on the same scale so there is more than one way for a student to receive WIDA scores.

WIDA scores have 6 levels of English language proficiency. Students who score at Level 1 are often learning their first words of English. Students scoring at Level 6 often perform similarly to their native-English-speaking peers.

Your EL students will have WIDA scores for each domain: Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing. They will also have composite scores: Expressive, Receptive, Oral, and Literacy. Lastly, they will have a composite Overall score. If you only hear one of your EL's scores, it's likely the Overall.

Each student learns English differently, with some skills developing before others. For this reason it's important to look at their scores for each domain. Two students with Overall scores of 3.5 may be very different in class. One of them may have very high Reading scores with lower Speaking and Writing scores, averaging out to 3.5. The other may perform around Level 3 or 4 in all domains.

The best way to understand what your EL can do is to find their scores on the Can Do Descriptors Rubric. You will find an approximation of what types of tasks you can expect them to do at each level. You may need to modify your assignments so that they more closely approximate the student's skills. For example, you might test your EL on the same material but give them a matching test instead of long answer questions. During the year, with decreasing scaffolds, you will work with them on the skills needed to reach the next level.

Can Do Descriptors Name Chart: This chart covers Grades PK-12, Levels 1-6. Be sure to scroll to make sure you're on the right grade level. There are 4 pages per grade level: Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing. This chart is designed for you to print the relevant pages and write your EL students' names right on the squares by their current proficiency levels.

Multilingual students are first screened when they arrive in a Massachusetts public school (or in one of the other 40 states that use WIDA.) They get one score then.

Then each year all EL and Opt-Out EL students students take the ACCESS for ELLs test. Normally this takes place in January. We don't receive our scores from DESE until many months later, often in May or June. So we are almost always discussing scores from a test that took place several months ago. By the time we talk, the student's skills have likely progressed.

On occasion we may administer the WIDA MODEL, which can be done at any point in the year. Most of the time, however, we will talk with you about an EL's progress year to year and how they are doing now based on our own informal assessments.