About Assessment

Through a combination of practical experience in my teaching posts, and formal education at ULACIT, I have learned that tests have to be thought of as learning tools because of the feedback they provide, and that they require careful preparation. For example, although I`ve been teaching the same subjects for some years, none of my exams are exactly the same, because the students are never exactly the same. People grow, evolve, things happen, and all of these produce variations that a teacher has to be attuned to in order to offer the best possible learning environment. It often takes me a couple of hours to design a test to my satisfaction.

Many times students are afraid of exams because they have been used as power tools to intimidate them into submission, or because the tests are not well prepared and feel like walking through a misty swamp.

Assessment has to reflect what has been covered in the learning sessions: each subject, the weight of the percentage the points contribute to the overall grade, and the type of exercises’ difficulty –identify when just introducing the subject, complete once students have had a chance to practice but still need help to jug the memory, and finally production when students have appropriated the way to use the structure you are assessing.

In order to insure that you are designing documents that are clear and easy to use by the students, it helps to imagine yourself in their shoes and do the exercises just as you expect them to do them. It’s amazing how many little mistakes one can catch that way.

One of the mistakes we tend to make is misjudge the time allotted to complete the assessment. The Ministry of Education provides guidelines, for each type of exercise, but time management is also a skill that has to be practiced before it is mastered. The amount of time it takes a student to complete a test provides valuable input when seen in conjunction with the accuracy of the answers.

When studying English, tests should be faithful reflections of authentic language use (not disjointed, out of context utterances). The more that context is provided, the closer we will place students to the actual challenges of real use for which they are being prepared. Overall, perhaps the most important thing to remember is that students should not be surprised by what they find in an assessment exercise.

Something else to take into consideration is the difference between public and private schools. For example, public schools are forced by the Ministry of Education (MEP), which rules them, to apply summative tests, while private schools have more freedom to apply alternative formative testing (although only to a percentage of the total grade), summative testing is also expected by the MEP from such educational centers. Even the test that is conducted for graduation requirements at the end of high school, is a summative test, that does not respect different styles of learning.

Ideally, we should be using formative assessments because, as mentioned in the text given to us to read, in formative settings, the activities as well as the tests reflect the kinds of challenges, and allow for the kinds of solutions, that learners would encounter in communication outside the classroom.

In formative learning sessions and testing, the student is co-owner of the process, setting goals, defining pace, and assessing progress. However, in order to be able to do so successfully, the overall system has to be set up this way, not just a subject, or for a year.

I’m not saying that if students are not used to this learning style it should not be attempted, but it is going to require an adaptation period and a far greater effort for all involved.

Even teachers have to get used to a different way of doing things. For example, checklists and scoring rubrics have to be constructed with a lot of attention because we tend to clump information, or take things for granted, which then results in tools that are incomplete, ambiguous, and open to subjective considerations.

Since students have to be provided with a useful assessment tool that they can comfortably use, one option is to discuss and construct it jointly at the beginning of the learning period, and to practice using it so students can be relaxed with the tool. Then, opportunities for fine tuning arise. Of course, adjustments have to be made to account for student maturity and previous familiarity with this type of learning strategy.  

Something I like about self and peer assessment, though, is that students become more familiar with the fact that communication is a social act, and therefore, it is in the interaction between producers and receivers of the message that effectiveness should be determined, and opportunities for improvement identified.

Such an approach benefits not only the students of a particular subject, but society as a whole because the more people use it, the more we contribute to the development of responsible citizens, and that in turn has the potential to transform our societies into more sustainable, fair, and tolerant ones.