2310NVA203.

1] 01 - Classroom-based Assessment

Session 2 - SUMMARY - CHAPTER 1 (P. 1-26)

1. Assessment - appraising or estimating the level or magnitude of some attribute of a
person
Educational practice - assessment encompass a wide range of methodological
techniques
2. Test - a subset of assessment, a genre of assessment techniques.
method of measuring a person's ability, knowledge, or performance in a given domain.
In particular:
● method must be explicit and structured
● must measure - a process of quantifying a test-taker’s performance according to
explicit procedures or rules
● measures an individual's ability, knowledge, or performance
● measures performance, the results imply the test-taker’s ability or competence
● measures a given domain
3. Measurement - quantifying the observed performance of classroom learners.
● Quantification - Numbers - provide exact descriptions of student performance
● Ex: test scores
4. Evaluation - be involved when the results of a test (or assessment procedure) are used
to make decisions
● interpretation of information
● “value” the results - convey the worth of the performance to the test-taker
(good/bad performance)
● Ex: conveying the “meaning” of test scores - “Excellent!”
5. Assessment and learning
Tests are a subset of assessment, but they are certainly not the only form of assessment
that a teacher can apply.
Optimal learning environment - students have the freedom to experiment
● teachers - observing students’ performance, taking measurements, offering
qualitative feedback, and suggesting strategies.
6. Informal and formal assessment
● Informal assessment - incidental, unplanned comments and responses (Ex: “Nice
job!”
○ embedded in classroom tasks designed to elicit performance without
recording results and making fixed conclusions about a student’s
competence.
○ virtually always nonjudgmental
○ Ex: offering advice about how to better pronounce a word
● Formal assessment - exercises / procedures - designed to tap into skills and
knowledge.
○ systematic, planned sampling techniques
○ give teacher and student an appraisal of student achievement
○ all tests are formal assessments, but of all formal assessment is testing
 ○ Ex: Students portfolio of materials are formal assessment but not “tests”
○ A systematic set of observations of the frequency of a student's oral
participation in class
7. Formative and summative assessment
● Formative assessment - evaluating students in the process of “forming” their
competencies and skills - help students continue that growth process.
○ all kinds of informal assessment are formative
○ offer feedback to improve the learner’s language ability
● Summative assessment - measure, or summarize, what a student has grasped -
typically occurs at the end of a course or unit of instruction.
○ Final exams in a course and general proficiency exams
○ Often involve evaluation
8. Norm-referenced and Criterion-referenced Tests
● Norm-Referenced Tests
○ each test-taker’s score is interpreted in relation to average score, middle
score, standard deviation, and/or percentile rank.
○ to place test-takers in rank order along a mathematical continuum
○ Ex: SAT, GRE, TOEFL
● Criterion-referenced tests
○ give test- takers feedback - in the form of grades, on specific course or
lesson objectives.
○ involving students in only one course and connected to a particular
curriculum
9. Purposes of Assessment
● Commercially designed and administered tests
○ measure proficiency,
○ place students into one of several levels of a course
○ diagnose students’ strengths and weaknesses
● Classroom-based, teacher-made tests
○ diagnose difficulty or measure achievement in a given unit of a course.
10. Types of Assessment
● Achievement tests
○ to measure learners’ ability within a classroom lesson, a unit, or even an
entire curriculum.
○ to determine whether course objectives have been met— and appropriate
knowledge and skills acquired —by the end of a given period of
instruction.
○ Often are summative - administered at the end of a lesson, unit,...
○ Formative - offers feedback about the quality of a learner's performance
in subsets of the unit or course.
○ range from 5- or 10-minute quizzes to 3-hour final examinations
● Diagnostic Tests
○ to identify aspects of a language that a student needs to develop or that a
course should include
 ○ elicit information on what students need to work on in the future
○ offers more detailed, subcategorized information about the learner than
achievement tests
● Placement tests
○ some achievement and proficiency tests
○ to place a student into a particular level or section of a language
curriculum or school
○ usually includes a sampling of the material to be covered in the various
courses in a curriculum
○ Take on formative role
○ formats—depending on the nature of a program and its needs
○ diagnostic information on a student’s performance - gives teachers a
head start on assessing their students’ abilities.
● Proficiency Tests
○ to test global competence in a language
○ test overall ability
○ traditionally consisted of standardized multiplechoice items on grammar,
vocabulary, reading comprehension, and aural comprehension
○ almost always summative and norm-referenced
○ provide results (single scores) - sufficient for the gatekeeping role they
play in accepting or denying someone passage to the next level of
education
● Aptitude Tests
○ to measure capacity or general ability to learn a foreign language a priori
and ultimate predicted success in that undertaking.
○ to apply to the classroom learning of any language
○ Research suggests that mimicry, memorization, and puzzle solving are
not universally correlated with language course success, especially in
untutored language acquisition. - seldom used today
○ today - to measure language aptitude more often and provide learners
with information about their preferred styles and their potential strengths
and weaknesses,
11. ISSUES IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT: THEN AND NOW
a. Behavioral Influences on Language Testing
○ discrete-point tests (entrance examinations) - designed on the
assumption that language can be broken down into its component parts
(4 skills and other units of English) and that those parts can be tested
successfully
■ provided fertile ground for psychometric structuralism - test
designers seized the tools of the day to focus on issues of validity,
reliability, and objectivity
b. Integrative Approaches
○ cloze tests: fill in the blanks in the reading text provided
○ dictations: listen to a short passage and write what they hear
 c. Unitary trait hypothesis: which suggested an “indivisible” view of language
proficiency: that vocabulary, grammar, phonology, the “four skills,” and other
discrete points of language could not be disentangled from each other in
language performance.
d. Communicative Language Testing
- Strategic competence (the ability to use communicative strategies to
compensate for breakdowns and to enhance the rhetorical effect of utterances) in
the process of communication.
e. Traditional and “Alternative” Assessment

f. Performance-Based Assessment (Task-based performance)

- Includes: oral production, written production, open-ended responses, integrated
performance (across skill areas), group performance, and other interactive tasks.
- is time-consuming and therefore expensive, but those extra efforts are paying off
in the form of more direct testing because students are assessed as they perform
actual or simulated real-world tasks.
CURRENT “HOT TOPICS” IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT
a. Dynamic Assessment
- The zone of proximal development (ZPD) considers a learner’s potential abilities
beyond the actual performance in a task, what the learner can do when others
give assistance.
- Classroom practices and assessments may include:
+ providing clear tasks and activities
+ posing questions that prompt students to demonstrate understanding and
knowledge
+ interventions with feedback and student reflections on their learning
=> All these examples have the capacity for long-term learner development and are at
the heart of DA.
b. Assessing Pragmatics
- Discourse completion tasks: role plays, and sociopragmatic judgment tasks
- has focused mainly on speech acts
- include assessment of learners’ participation in extended discourse.
c. Use of Technology in Testing
- computer-assisted language learning (CALL)
- mobile assisted language learning (MALL)
- computer-adaptive test (CAT)
- corpus linguistics
=> Technology-assisted testing offers unique advantages but some disadvantages.