When selecting assessment materials and procedures for linguistically diverse students, norm-referenced evaluations are likely to:

• A. overidentify disability even when appropriately administered.
• B. underidentify disability when properly administered
• C. prove disability without error
• D. be perfectly valid for all populations

Answer: (A)

Norm-referenced assessments compare a student’s performance to a normative group. For linguistically diverse students, differences in language proficiency, dialect, and cultural experiences can affect test performance even when there is no disability. This creates a bias in the results: the student may score lower because the test language or format doesn’t match their background, not because they have a disability. So such tests tend to identify more students as disabled than is accurate, which is overidentification. Because the norming sample often isn’t representative of linguistic minority groups, even careful administration can’t fully remove this bias. That’s why this type of assessment is not the best standalone tool for this population; educators should supplement with nonverbal, dynamic, and criterion-referenced measures and consider language development and cultural context to avoid misclassification.