How to use ACCESS for ELLs scores to help your students

By Terri Mossgrove and Emma Wright

Your students have taken ACCESS for ELLs, you’ve received their scores, and you understand how scores are calculated and how to interpret the results (or you're about to once you read this article: Everything you’ve ever wanted to know: Scoring ACCESS for ELLs). So, how do you take those scores and help your students? WIDA Professional Learning experts Terri Mossgrove and Emma Wright give some tips and resources to help you get started.

How can I use different parts of the score report for planning?

ACCESS scores provide a great foundation to conference with students about their growth on the test and in the classroom. The ACCESS for ELLs Interpretive Guide to Score Reports is an excellent resource for understanding student scores and the different reports you receive. We encourage you to refer to it when looking at score reports. Here’s a quick overview of how to use different parts of the report:

• Use proficiency levels alongside the WIDA Can Do Descriptors to make comparisons across domains, not across grade levels, and to develop a student-specific English language skill portrait.
• Use scale scores to look at growth. Use scale scores to make comparisons across grade levels, but not across domains, and to monitor a student’s growth over time within a domain.
• Composite scores are proficiency level scores and scale scores for different combinations of language domains. Composite scores can summarize student skills, but because a high score in one language domain can inflate a composite score, a student’s individual domain score can be more informative than a single composite score. Looking at students' growth across individual domains helps paint a fuller picture and provides a focus for students' individual needs.

How can ACCESS scores be used to support planning?

ACCESS scores should be viewed with many other data points to inform instructional decisions. In considering how to best support your students, ACCESS scores are one data point in a much larger tapestry of student knowledge. It is essential that you know your students well and have a robust set of data to inform your instruction. Here are some of our recommendations.

Build relationships with your students and their families

As an educator, you understand the importance of getting to know your students and their families. Family engagement is a relationship between families and educators that is ongoing, mutual, built on trust and respect and focused on student learning and achievement.  

• Learn more about the key considerations for building relationships with families in this guide, ABCs of Family Engagement.
• Help parents understand ACCESS for ELLs score reports so you can better engage with them. This letter, available in many languages, contains general information about ACCESS for ELLs and is meant to accompany score reports as an explanation for parents and guardians. The letter was designed to be customizable so your district can add details relevant to your testing window, exit criteria, level of English language support, etc.
• You can also send our Understanding Your Child’s Scores flyer home with students. This flyer, available in several languages, helps parents understand what scores mean and how they are used.
• Celebrate and honor your families’ home languages! This flyer, Family Connections through Home Languages, highlights the important role home languages play in maintaining communication and relationships with families. Encourage families to use their home language(s) to
  • Share family stories orally
  • Sing favorite songs
  • Read books together
  • Read signs, labels or other visuals in the environment
  • Discuss events, stories, movies or games
  • Show children how to do something
  • Create arts and crafts
• Get ideas for developing reciprocal partnerships with multilingual families from this WIDA Snapshot, Multilingual Children and Their Families.

Building relationships with families, developing reciprocal partnerships and honoring home languages will all go hand in hand with the score report when making plans for instruction.

Focus on assets and use appropriate grade-level resources and support

The WIDA Can Do Philosophy reflects the foundational belief that everyone has valuable resources they can use to support their own and others’ learning.

Multilingual learners come with knowledge and skills in multiple languages. With appropriate scaffolding, these assets can become a robust foundation for content-area learning and language development. By exploring and focusing on what language learners can do, you can see the entire context. Use your students’ score reports along with their assets to plan appropriately. Our Focus Bulletin, Supporting Multilingual Learners’ Language Growth through Language Development Portfolios, shows how one fourth-grade team introduced portfolios into their teaching practice to help them understand language growth.  

This Focus Bulletin, Embedding the Can Do Cycle Throughout the School Year, offers resource banks of questions that can be used to elicit student assets and reflect on ways to build on those assets.

Use this snapshot on WIDA Proficiency Level Descriptors (PLDs) to give you ideas on how to apply the PLDs as you consider scaffolding practices that support multilingual students in meeting grade-level content learning goals.

Collaborate with your colleagues to better support your students

Collaboration is one of the four Big Ideas of the WIDA English Language Development Standards, 2020 Edition.

Every teacher is a language teacher. All teachers need meaningful, accurate and actionable information about their multilingual learners’ language development. Share and discuss your students’ score reports with all their teachers. Our Focus Bulletin, Collaboration: Working Together to Serve Multilingual Learners, provides a process for engaging in co-assessing.

1. Identify each student’s strengths in language and literacy development.
2. Analyze patterns in both language and content learning for groups of students.
3. Generate possible explanations for student performance, from multiple points of view.
4. Identify the most appropriate instructional approaches to respond to student needs.

Here are some tips for collaborative planning:

• Use data from ACCESS for ELLs to evaluate and facilitate language growth over time.
• Identify the most prominent Key Language Uses necessary to meet content objectives to help prioritize and organize a simultaneous focus on language and academic content.
• Select relevant Language Expectations to develop unit-level language goals.
• Use Annotated Language Samples to inform language focus throughout units and lessons.
• Use WIDA Can Do Name Charts to group students strategically.

More information on the resources listed above can be found in the WIDA ELD Standards Framework.

This two-page "comic" strip shows the story of how a science teacher and an ESL teacher work together on their multilingual learners' language development and ways of meaningfully engaging with the content of a science unit.

Additional resources

Learn more about resources available in your state on the WIDA website, by selecting your state from the member/state drop down menu.

WIDA also has a variety of free webinars, called WIDA Webinars, that explore topics of importance to educators of multilingual learners. Register for upcoming webinars and find recordings from past webinars on the WIDA Webinars webpage.