Evaluating for learning, the aim of standardized tests?

When I think of the sense of assessing students, I think of the reasons why we do it. Not only now that I have a little of experience in teaching but also as a student. As I analyze different perspectives I can notice two general aims when we talk about aims of assessment.

Assessing for promoting more effective learning:  this is the kind of assessment we should implement in every single classroom. It is known that assessment is part of the teaching process; but teaching requires a process of making mistakes, correcting and receiving input that sometimes can be kind of feedback that students need. Also, as students get ready to be assessed, they are revising the input they had received and practicing what they are supposed to practice to then, be able to show their acquired knowledge and be willing to receive feedback to reach a better level of proficiency.

Assessing for political implications: Here, we take into account standardized tests where everyone takes a test which will determine if a student is accepted or not in a specific institution such as a public university, or whether the institution where (s)he was “prepared” reached the standards that determine if that learner is proficient in a certain domain.

Both types of assessment measure knowledge on behalf of the students, but do both of them ensure an effective learning? I dare say, no. Only in case of the first one I mentioned, learning is promoted due to its formative nature when the teacher has the chance to give feedback.

In the second one, where standardized tests give the opportunities for students to enjoy a privilege, this promotion of learning is not visible. According to Brown (2003), there exists a thorny situation inside the classrooms because of these tests. Teaching and learning are driven by them and other important criteria of the curriculum are left aside. This promotes only extrinsic motivation in teachers and students, who only worry about performing well in a test that in the end, will not lead to further learning.

It is virtually inevitable to skip standardized tests in educational field, so we as teachers should constantly reflect on the importance of formative assessment and teach students that the learning process is what is valuable for them in reality. Of course we all should keep the balance so as for us not to over nor underestimate any of the two kinds of examinations. 

THE RIGOROUS PROCEDURE OF DESIGNING AND SCORING TESTS

 When reflecting on the ways we as teachers have assessed students, we might remember our first experiences as assessors and the tasks we try to think about to fulfil the institution's policies about evaluation where we worked. It is so probable that we had made a lot of mistakes just because we thought that creating a test was only about thinking of the topics seen in class and asking students about them in order to get grades. Of course, that is one of the aims but then, when  time went by and we were gaining more experience we started to realize it was not that easy. I don't know if it only has happened to me, at least I can reflect on my own practices.

 As we observe guidelines explained by Genesee and Upshur we can confirm that the process of test design could be as rigurous as class preparation. In these few paragraphs, I'm gonna focus on just two aspects in the process of assembling and scoring tests.

 First of all, I want to talk about reliability in scoring. Casting my mind back, I remember that I used to work in place where testing was only required to do at the end of a term. No more tests results were taken into account to mesure students' performance. The course lasted 3 months and 8 units were included in such test. By coining what the authors introduced previously have stated, I can explain my reflection and questioning: Did just one test mesure what the students really knew? The fact of taking one test that mesured almost all what they have "learned", could influence their pshychological state? Could just one test assess 8 units at the same time? Those are the questions I asked myself and these are the answers I have now: It is undoubtedly necassary not to mesure students' performance with the results of a single test. It is likely to show inappropriate grades because aspects such as emotional states can influence their outcomes. Moreover, the amount of topics demands different opportunities of assessment. It is worth mentioning that these assessment practices have a relevant impact on the kind of teaching inside a classroom, an issue that is further this discussion.

The other aspect I want to mention is the importance of having analytical scoring procedures to assess open-ended questions. They are very useful and every place in charge of language teaching should have one to facilitate the scoring process and give it more reliability.

Again, I remember my practices and only in few times I have count on a list with specific criteria to measure Ss production. I have realized of its relevance and I have started to use it. It gives more rigurousity to my assessment.

We can see now how much effort a test could need though here we analized only two aspects. As long as time goes by and we acquire more knowledge on assessment, it is a must to start reflecting and making changes to improve our teaching-learning-assessment practices.

Journals, questionnaires, and interviews: Types of needs analysis?

The importance of conducting a needs analysis is known by many teachers and student-teachers, who are interested in getting to meet the specific necessities of different classroom environments. When they are applied, teaching and learning processes are expected to change, improve, and go to the rightest direction for them to be effective. Through the following paragraphs, we will see some reasons why journals, questionnaires, and interviews can be taken as types of needs analysis that deliver more benefits than just getting answers though a survey.

Most of the times, when we think about needs analysis we relate the idea to a survey only, but as far as we examine the benefits of other alternatives such as journals and interviews, we realize that they are not just all about that. They are a deeper manner to conduct what is known by us as needs analysis because they are very focused on students’ perceptions, interests, and desires in educational settings.

Journals: as mentioned before, their main concern is to get to know students perceptions. Journals are written conversations between teachers and students in a relatively informal way where they talk about a classroom-related topic or another one that allows the teacher to get closer to the students’ thoughts. These pieces of writing receive feedback from the teacher and that leads to continue a conversation where more and more perceptions are delivered. Of course, the information influences                                                future teaching practices.

So far, we can see that in a general sense they are needs analyses but now, let us see other further benefits they bring to us as teachers:

• They permit to train the students in the mechanics of writing as a genuine communication.
• They increase closer communication with teachers and they provide more reliable data on their real needs.
• They lead to an individualized teaching strategy on writing, where the teacher can give more specific feedback and observe progress.
• They enhance students’ involvement in learning.

Questionnaires and interviews: their main purpose is to ask questions about a variety of issues that surround language teaching; there are many designs to get effective students’ answers to be able to actually guide our practice and make relevant decisions. As journals, in a general sense, they share the aims of a needs analysis but let us observe some further advantages:

• In the case of interviews with students, not only do they provide answers to questions but also they lend themselves to train in the mechanics of speaking.
• They promote the enhancement of fluency.
• They allow the teachers to have a clearer panorama of the students’ progress on speaking skills.

After having realized of the benefits that journals and interviews offer, that apart from analyzing needs they promote the improvement of language skills, I think they are powerful tools inside our classrooms. I really would like to implement them and learn to adapt them to specific contexts. What about you? Can you see the negative part? I’m looking forward to knowing your minds.   

Seventh week assignment: Systematizing observations in the classroom

As the other alternatives in assessment (portfolios, conferences, self- and peer- assessments, journals) observations are different options to assess students’ performance and aspects of teaching practice. Most people could say that they are not as affective as theory suggests because they do not give a grade or because they require a lot of time and that makes it unreliable. It is true that it is not a summative assessment but we should keep in mind that the most important characteristic of those alternatives is their formative nature. For that reason, we as teachers should take them as an opportunity to make changes in the classroom, to improve or help more our students.

In this little space, I will focus on a few ways to systematize observations so as to show that they can be reliable as far as they have clear objectives and specific instruments to collect information.

Anecdotal records: if you are not an experienced teacher in terms of carrying out observations, you can start by using this type of observations. You can use an informal notebook for you to write an aspect you consider important as soon as you observe it.

They are more useful for internal purposes; teacher can evaluate and tailor instruction for their learners.

Checklists: compared with the previous example, these types have predesigned categories for recording your observations. They require precise and specific categories and criteria for assessing students and instructional activities. On them, teachers select among the criteria the one(s) that correspond to the observations. In next example, the teacher is observing a linguistic aspect during a class and there are some options (s)he chooses and writes a line according to the observed performance:

Rating scales: the difference with the formerly mentioned is that this one provides more categories in which observations can be clasified. Generally, they use numbers to locate the students according to their performance. Here is an example of an observation of oral production where different scores are given:

These formats will systematize our observations in a way that they can give us appropriate information for the learning and teaching processes. 

Another key point is that before carrying out observations, we must be clear about the objectives of our observation. They must be organized according to our instructional plans, content, materials, equipment, and activities. 

After that, organized information will be useful to prepare effective reports.

Fifth week asignment: The enriching and powerful experience of reading

The enriching and powerful experience of reading

During any learning process, whenever we think of the reading skill, we are used to taking it for granted; even more when that learning process is related to language. There exists the tendency to consider the ability of reading as something basic in every learner’s life. To some extend that is true since it is one of the things we are encourage to learn since the very beginning of our academic life. The question is: do we really know how to read? Is our reading the simple decoding of letters and graphemes? Those questions came to mind when we as teachers are supposed to assess students reading ability. According to Brown (2003) there is a distinction between bottom-up and top-down strategies in reading process. The first one refers to the ability to decode letters, words, and small parts of texts. The other one refers to comprehension itself. These two concepts lead to change our mind about what reading means and implies so that teaching and assessing reading becomes a tough labor to do.

As soon as I read chapter eight from Brown’s book I immediately realized that reading is such an important skill but it is usually underestimated but widely evaluated in language learning contexts. We have been asked to demonstrate that we understand a text but we have had very little chances of receiving instruction on that aspect because, as said before, it is taken for granted. It is so important that it leads to learn other aspects: vocabulary, grammar, writing, and even speaking, it facilitates the instruction of those skills and therefore, it allows language integration.

When observing the relevance of reading and how it has sometimes been taken in academic environments, I conclude that it is a skill that deserves special attention, mostly in foreign language learning where bottom-up as well as top-down strategies, play a crucial role when teaching. Reading must be shown by teachers as an opportunity to widen learning not only of language but also of the world. That is why a great deal of reading should be carried to classes so that it permits that the teacher provides appropriate feedback on the different tasks and/or assignments and at the same time, an  effective assessment of it. To finish, teaching and assessment of reading should be highly related, it means that reading assessment should look content valid as there was enough reading practice during the classes with suitable feedback. Then, when students take tests, they feel comfortable because they find reading experience enriching rather than a confusing task. That implies the use of bottom-up and top-down strategies appropriately.

Third week assignment: Assessing listening

                     The challenge of assessing listening

Brown (2003) states, “the integration of skills is of paramount importance in language learning”. However, assessing listening and reading is a tough issue since they are processes that cannot be easily measured by observing students’ real performance. Brown says: “When you propose to assess someone’s ability in one or a combination of the four skills, you assess that person’s competence, but you observe the person’s performance”. As a personal conclusion for this statement, I can say that both competence as well as performance are very important concepts to keep in mind when assessing listening.

It is also stated that performance can be affected by external factors inside a student such as an illnesses or lack of sleep, which could interfere in the student performance so one as a teacher could not evaluate the learners’ real competence in the language. That is why we should take into account at least two or more performances before reaching a conclusion on the real student’s competence and performance in the language, and more specifically, in a skill (listening in this case).

To keep in mind, it is also mentioned the fact that listening is a receptive skill and for that reason, its assessment must be made by observing productive skills (speaking and writing) and not by listening itself. That needs to be made by inference; it looks disappointing but that is why, a series of possibilities to establish the aims of assessing listening are detailed for us to have a clearer idea of what evaluating listening means.

It is important to understand that listening is a powerful component of speaking, so it has different functions. By bearing in mind that principle, we can establish the objectives of a listening test or assessment as follows: “Comprehending of surface structure of language”, “Understanding the pragmatic context”, “Determining meaning of auditory input”, or “Developing the gist, a global or comprehensive understanding”.

Once an objective has been stated in a listening assessment, different types of listening tasks can be applied to evaluate learners’ competence and performance: “Intensive”, for perception of language components, “Responsive”, a short stretch of language to make an equal short response, “Selective”, to comprehend specific information in context or longer stretches of spoken language, and “Extensive” to understand the main idea and make inferences. By applying them, a variety of tools can be designed to assess students, looking for authentic language as much as possible. Retelling is an example of listening assessment where the learner has to listen to a track (a story, news…) and communicate what it said by answering specific questions or just by retelling it as the name indicates.

As a personal view, I observed that evaluating a skill requires the integration of all the rest of skills, not a single one because we communicate through all of them not by segmenting it. Furthermore, I would like to highlight the fact that it is almost impossible to assess students’ competence by analyzing one piece of information, so we should try as much as possible to gather a lot of it to reach conclusions for us not to obtain unreliable results.  Finally, one as a teacher should make use of different types of listening tasks to evaluate that skill to get closer to the real world listening performance.

First Week Assignment

Summary: ASSESSMENT, EVALUATION, TESTING AND GRADING

Although many people including teachers and students limit the meaning of assessment to giving tests and assigning grades, Scanland (2012) defines assessment as the process of making a judgment or measurement of worth of an entity. That could be a person, a process, or a program.  According to Brissenden and Slater n.d. as cited by Scanlan (2012), learner assessment is designed to serve several purposes. They are “motivating and directing learning”, “providing feedback to students on their performance”, “providing feedback on instruction and/or the curriculum”, and “ensuring standards of progression are met”. Besides, learner assessment involves communication to teachers who will be able to get feedback on teaching, students on their own learning, curriculum designers on the curriculum, and administrators on the use of resources.

Regarding the importance of assessment, they explain that it drives students learning. It means that depending on the strategies used, different kinds of learning will take place. In that case, assessment strategies that focus on recall of knowledge will likely promote superficial learning. On the other hand, if assessment strategies that demand critical thinking or creative problem-solving are chosen, students will have a higher level of achievement.

According to McAlpine (2002) as cited by Scanlan (2012) there exist dichotomies poles to explain the different types of assessment: “Formative vs. Summative”, “Informal vs. Formal”, “Continuous vs. Final”, “Process vs. Product”, and “Divergent vs. Convergent”. The Formative aims to provide feedback to the learner, which can be used to identify strengths and weakness and hence improve future performance. The summative on the other hand, is used primarily to make decisions for grading or determine readiness for progression and communicate students’ abilities to external entities such as administrators or employees.

In the Informal assessment, the judgments are integrated with other tasks often used to provide formative feedback. It tends to be less threatening for the students and for that reason less stressful to them.  In the case of Formal assessment, students are aware that the task they are doing is for assessment purpose. They are summative in nature and tend to have greater motivation impact as they are associated with increased stress.

Continuous assessment happens throughout a learning experience. Even though it involves increased effort for teacher and student, it provides with the information needed to improve teaching and learning in process. Different from the one previously presented, The Final assessment takes place at the end of a learning activity, so it cannot be used for formative purposes.

Process and Product assessments differ in that the first one focusses on the steps or procedures underlying a particular ability or task; but the second one takes into account the result or outcome of a process. It means it focuses on the answer, not on the steps to get that result.  

The last types of assessments are Divergent and Convergent. Divergent refers to those for which a range of answers or solutions might be considered correct like in essay texts. Contrary to Divergent, the Convergent has only one correct response per question, and it values the assessment of real knowledge.

Last but not least, Scanlan (2012) states the distinction between assessment vs. evaluation, and assessment vs. grading. The most important aspect highlighted is that assessment is for students while evaluation is for instruction. In the same way, assessment is contrasted with grading and it is stated that the last one is considered a component of assessment although many think they are totally different because assessment is to measure student growth and process. Whichever conception is taken anyway, will depend on the teacher’s own philosophy.