Professional Development Report 1

Professional Development Report

Yini Chen

Colorado State University

Professional Development Report 2

I attended a Brown Bag session at Colorado State University on October 20th, 2017.

This presentation was about investigating the effect of selected-response item formats

on reading comprehension which was led by Tatiana Nekrasova-Beker and Tony Becker.

The presentation was the second part of the Brown Bag Series. The presenters and the

audience discussed the factors that might affect the difficulty of reading items on a test

and shared the possible implications for assessing reading comprehension.

One of the parts that impressed me most was the audience was divided into five

groups. Each group was given a type of reading tests items and asked to consider

and discuss the questions that the presenters gave them. When I performed these

habitual reading test items, it was the first time I seriously considered the difference

between the test items’ form, the skills that are assessed by the test items, and the

advantages and disadvantages of these reading tests. As a future English teacher, it is

very important to have reasonable and complete assessment methods and standards

for students’ reading comprehension skills. This presentation gave me an insight into

what I should consider and how I might need to refine my reading comprehension

assessments in future English teaching work.