Since we have a deep notion of what Assessment involves, it seems to be more than just a mean to grade students. According to the chapter, we must focus on the kind of assessment that provides the necessary evidences to see whether the students achieved the desired results or not. Therefore we need to plan the different assessment instruments, based on tasks in which the students can apply their knowledge in a real context. It means that we need to change the current aim that Chilean education has, which is entirely focused on teaching isolated pieces of information, and start thinking how we can make students understand from an application view. The idea is not longer consider contents as abstract units, but as concrete tools that may allow them to solve any problem in their lives. Personally I think that this particular way of teaching might produce the easiest engagement of the students with the task proposed, what would facilitate its understanding. It is produced because those tasks are closer to what they have learnt or seen in the reality (personal background), allowing them to make their own connections, in order to face challenges.
Another aspect that assessment involves is how reliable and valid an instrument could become. At the first sight there is not difference between the concepts of reliability and validity but there is. According to what we have learnt in class the first one is regarded as the way of getting concrete results (marks), and the second one is regarded as the interpretation that teachers give to those results. In spite of their differences, both are essential at the moment of assessing, because we need to be one hundred percent sure that that method applied will reflect the required evidences, based on the different student performances. This is crucial, in order to have a general outlook related to the operation of our teaching practices. That is why the use guidelines or criteria to evaluate, specifically non- productive skills are really important because they allow collecting evidences by means of an accurate process. For example, rubrics and specification tables help to measure not only the results, but all the variables which are involved in the learning process, giving real evidences of the level of understanding achieved by the students. Obviously the interpretation of that data is in charge of the teacher who will have to consider as the external factors as the internal ones, in order to make the necessary adjustments which help to enhance the level of feedback between the parts.
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Jonathan,
ReplyDeleteas you mention in your comment, it's not easy to achieve the kind of assessment that provides clear evidence of what the learners have learned. It's a hard task, and unfortunately do not have the support of the system to do it properly, which makes it ever harder. But that is the challenge, to do it with the tools we have now, because to change the system as you mention above is impossible my dear!! So, let's take our weapons and fight, it's all we can do. Probably we won't make big changes, but our students will notice the difference and they'll appreciate it.
See you then!
Scarlette
My dear, one way to get closer to assessing students understanding is just moving from the rigidity of discrete-point testing and its structuralist-behavioristic tenets and start thinking in terms of not only assessing small chunks of language but considering Hyme's and Carrols' ideas regarding assessing not only how much a student knows about the language, but how much a person can use the language in real communicative context. One thing teachers should be always clear about is that there are uncountable ways to assess students' and, of course, students' understanding.
ReplyDeleteIt is of course desirable that the decisions we make by getting concrete results or evidence from our students allow us to make sound judgements to make appropriate decisions to enhance the learning of EFL
Jonathan
ReplyDeleteWhile reading the article I really liked the idea of including more than one rubrics to assess my students, but as I am a lazy person (lazy yet not irresponsible) I think it is a big issue nowadays to think of the clear criteria to build such rubrics... At the beginning, I'll have to spend lot of time thinking about the aspects I want to evaluate... Nonetheless, it's going to be only the kickoff since in the future then I'll have a file with quite few rubrics to check, polish up, print and use again... And I will eventually sleep happily...
Great idea using two different rubrics to assess understanding as well as use of language. For sure this leads to objectivity and peace of mind.
See you my friend!
The idea of using more than one rubric is not necessary, what is really necessary here is to CREATE the right rubric to use. It can take days to create the rubric but, by the time you finish it and use it, you will realize that the effor was worth. And the more you use rubrics he easies will be the creation of a future rubric.
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