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 multifaceted 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.