FAD on Assessment
Background
I would like to focus on assessment as a very important tool to keep a close eye on my students and for my own planning of lessons.
I believe that assessment is important for the planning of my teaching in order to know at what level my pupils currently are, and to direct my differentiated teaching accordingly.
For students’ motivation it is important that they can follow their progress, that they can be corrected if they are not on track or if they are heading in the wrong direction.
Research question
Which professional tools may help me in assessing my students, and at the same time optimize my lesson planning?
Theory
Pupils can be assessed in various ways dependent on the skill you want to test / assess, and what the result is to be used for.
You may use a syllabus-content or criterion related test, which are tests directly connected to either syllabus or objectives of a certain course.
A test like DIALANG (diagnostic/criterion-referenced, Ur p. 245 and Hughes p.21) shows whether a student can perform a task satisfactorily, whereas the norm-referenced testing is to show how well a student performs compared to a certain norm (e.g. compared to the other students in a similar area).
Placement tests are sometimes used by e.g. language schools to place the student at the right level when starting an education.
Furthermore tests can be either direct or indirect (Hughes, p.17). Direct testing is to measure the student’s productive skills in a certain areas, and indirect by e.g. testing receptive skills by making the student use his/her productive skills.
When choosing the assessment method, there are some very important factors to consider. Is the test valid and reliable (Rohde, PP Aug. 2010)? Should it be formative assessments (Hughes, p.5) which will help the student in her/his further work and the teacher in planning the differentiated teaching? Or should the test be summative (a final achievement test, Hughes p. 5 & 13), as in the FSA or the FS10, to see if the intake was equivalent to the input (Færch, p. 186)?
Another important thing to consider is the washback of the test (Stæhr, p. 163), meaning what are the effects of the test. There could either beneficial or harmful backwash. The harmful effect could occur if the test is not precise, if it’s not designed thoroughly to test what is necessary. To avoid harmful backwash “the proper relationship between teaching and testing is surely that of partnership” (Hughes, p.2).
Pupils may either be assessed by teachers or by themselves. Self-assessment - “learners assess themselves on their own performance using clear criteria and weighting systems agreed on beforehand” (Ur, p. 245). But they can also be assessed by their peers. Ioannou-Georgiou & Pavlou mentions a few examples of the beneficial backwash peer-assessment can have on the social atmosphere in the classroom. E.g. that the classroom is a community working towards the same goal (p. 10).
Discussion
In Denmark we do not have a tradition of doing several formative assessments a year. Why not? Are we afraid what we may find? When the pupils are assessed on their intake the teacher is at the same time assessed on his / her teaching (the input, Færch, p. 186). A negative backwash effect on bad teaching is that the students do not learn to master the English language as set forth in the curriculum.
When reading and analysing the “Engelsk i Grundskolen” from EVA 2003, we found out that the pupils progress in written English language skills stops when they reach the 7th grade level. That is alarming! What is our part in this as teachers? Do we not bear in mind what we actually are to teach according to the
curriculum? Are we afraid that if we realise the fact that only few pupils make progress in 8th and 9th grade we may have to revise our methods and start our planning all over again?
Regular testing or assessment might also result in the teacher teaching to the test. The backwash effect of this might either be positive or negative. Positive in the respect that the pupils will have to read, and negative if they read, test & forget. Whether there is negative backwash might depend on the pupils learning style. Kinaesthetic learners will not have had their “hands on” – which is very important for them.
There is a vast variety of tests to be used for assessing your pupils, e.g. peer-assessment, and there are a vast number of things to consider when choosing a test for your class. Both what you want to know and why, and what you want to use it for. Is it only for your own planning or should the pupils benefit from being tested as well? The quality (validity & reliability) of the test, direct or indirect and surely what skill is to be investigated? Would it be the productive or the receptive skills?
Practical examples
Within the past few years the National Tests have been introduced in Denmark. This is a computer based test of the pupil’s receptive skills (look at http://demo.evaluering.uvm.dk/) in primarily reading. The English test is executed once in the 7th grade. The teacher can see the result and talks to the pupil about it. The test results are not published.
A computer based test might raise problems for some pupils, who do not necessarily have major problems in the subject being tested. E.g. the formulation of the questions might be done in a way that is difficult to interpret for some. If it is not an absolutely clearly formulated there might be misunderstandings and wrong answers, or no answer at all!
To illustrate this I will take my own daughter as an example. She is at top 5 in her class (5th grade) and she was tested in Danish in last year’s National Test. I know it is not English, but the problem she experienced might as well be found in the 7th grade English test.
When reading through the fairly long texts she was left with the belief that there could be more than one answer to several of the questions. This meaning that the formulation of the questions could be misinterpreted and therefore not clear enough.
This in connection with the limited time to respond and the inexperienced situation of being assessed in front of a computer, lead her to make a lot of mistakes, she has shown not to make when being assessed in class by the teacher, in a well known environment.
I had a meeting with the teacher and we ran through the test question by question, and to the best of my knowledge quite a few of the questions were ambiguous and hard to interpret. Poor language.
List of references
Arthur Hughes, Testing for Language Teachers,
Cambridge University Press, Second edition 10th printing 2010
Sophie Ioannou-Georgiou & Pavlos Pavlou, Assessing Young Learners,
Oxford University Press, 2010
Penny Ur, A Course in Language Teaching
Cambridge University Press, 17th printing 2009
Lars Stenius Stæhr, Sprogfag i Forandring
Extract from ch. 5, Tilegnelse og testning af ordforråd
Lars Stenius Stæhr, Test i Folkeskolen
Extract from ch. 6, De Nationale test i et pædagogisk perspektiv
