The Benefit of Open Science for Early Career Researchers and Multilingual Assessment in Special Education

Open science practices provide early-career researchers in special education with resources, mechanisms, and infrastructure to mitigate structural barriers that have constrained research that is critical for providing equitable educational support for bilingual and multilingual students. Bilingual and multilingual children in U.S. schools are at increased risk for misdiagnosis and, consequently, misallocation of special education services due to limitations in our understanding of language development across heterogeneous multilingual profiles and a lack of linguistically appropriate and culturally responsive assessment tools. In this article, we examine how open science practices can help address these disparities by improving transparency, accessibility, and collaboration in basic and translational research involving multilingual populations. We discuss the barriers faced by early-career researchers working in this area and describe how openly available resources can address these challenges while facilitating replication, innovation, and cross-study comparisons. By improving access to data from historically underrepresented linguistic communities, innovative analytic procedures, and multilingual assessment tools, open science enables more accurate identification of language disorders, earlier intervention, and more equitable academic outcomes for bilingual and multilingual children.