Integrated assessment of Spanish heritage learners in a high school medical interpreter college/career program

Medical interpreters play an important role in bridging the language gap in health
care and in reducing health disparities in minority language populations. The
IMPACT (Interpreters for the Medical Profession through Articulated Curriculum and
Training) program is a medical interpreter for Spanish Heritage Language (HL)
speakers program at a career academy in central Ohio. The goals of this program
include meeting the demand for language access in central Ohio while at the same
time valuing HL learners’ experiences including language brokering (cf. Buriel et
al. 1998), affirming their linguistic assets, and providing opportunities for them to
develop competencies for future career and academic success. In this chapter, we
report on the development, implementation, and evaluation of this program. We
provide an integrated assessment approach that draws on qualitative and
quantitative measures to highlight the role of program participation on students’ college
and career readiness. Using a variety of methods including interviews, quantitative
measures of career decision, and academic data, we demonstrate that participation
in the IMPACT program positively influences students’ language proficiency,
language attitudes, and career decision self-efficacy. In doing so, we provide a multi-
faceted perspective on HL learner achievement that is consistent with the goals
of HL education (Beaudrie et al. 2014), that allows for integrated assessment of
student development and career-readiness from a variety of different perspectives,
and further demonstrates the importance of assessment models that consider the
unique linguistic, social, and cultural assets of HL students.