Because ELLs—just like students in the general population—come from a wide variety of cultural and educational backgrounds, item writers should not assume that students have had any previous experience with given tasks. For example, students should be told explicitly what type of response is acceptable for a constructed-response question, whether it is a paragraph, complete sentence, list, diagram, mathematical equation, and so on. Likewise, the criteria for the evaluation of the response should be made clear to the student. As this may add a significant reading load to the directions, information about how responses will be scored may be especially helpful if students receive it prior to the test.