Bridging Psychometric and Content Development Practices with AI: A Community-Based Workflow for Augmenting Hawaiian Language Assessments

TL;DR

This paper develops and evaluates a community-based AI workflow to ethically augment Hawaiian language assessments, ensuring cultural integrity while improving analysis efficiency and identifying systemic issues.

Contribution

It introduces a novel AI-assisted workflow for Indigenous language assessments that balances technological augmentation with cultural and ethical considerations.

Findings

AI effectively identified systemic design issues in assessments

The workflow accelerated analysis and maintained cultural integrity

AI served as an ethically bounded amplifier of human expertise

Abstract

This paper presents the design and evaluation of a community-based artificial intelligence (AI) workflow developed for the Kaiapuni Assessment of Educational Outcomes (K\=A'EO) program, the only native language assessment used for federal accountability in the United States. The project explored whether document-grounded language models could ethically and effectively augment human analysis of item performance while preserving the cultural and linguistic integrity of the Hawaiian language. Operating under the K\=A'EO AI Policy Framework, the workflow used NotebookLM for cross-document synthesis of psychometric data and Claude 3.5 Sonnet for developer-facing interpretation, with human oversight at every stage. Fifty-eight flagged items across Hawaiian Language Arts, Mathematics, and Science were reviewed during Round 2 of the AI Lab, producing six interpretive briefs that identified systemic design issues such as linguistic ambiguity, Depth-of-Knowledge (DOK) misalignment, and structural overload. The findings demonstrate that AI can serve as an ethically bounded amplifier of human expertise, accelerating analysis while simultaneously prioritizing fairness, human expertise, and cultural authority. This work offers a replicable model for responsible AI integration in Indigenous-language educational measurement.