Standard based

assessment
Created By: Weny Fitriana
(1503046060)
 Teacher standards
 The movement to create standards for teaching since
learner performance depends on the quality of instruction which
depends on the quality of professional development (Cloud, 2001).

 The importance of teacher standards in three domains:

1. Linguistics and language development
2. Culture and the interrelationship between language and culture
3. Planning and managing instruction
Make appropriate evaluations of
different kinds of items.
 Item facility (IF) – % of people who give the right answer
 Item Discrimination (IDis) – indicates the extent to which success on an item
corresponds to success on the whole test.
 Item Difficulty (ID) - finding out the % of people who get the item right in the
try-out group.
 TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of
Other Languages)

 TESOL provides professional teaching standards. However, it is

complex to assess whether teachers meet the criteria or not.

 TESOL’s standards advocates performance-based assessment

for the following reasons:
1. Teachers can demonstrate the standards in their teaching;
2. Teaching can be assessed through what teachers do with their
learners in their classrooms or virtual classrooms;
3. This performance can be detailed in indicators (i.e., examples of
evidence that the teacher can meet a part of a standard).
 TESOL (Cont.)
4. The processes used to assess teachers need to draw on
complex evidence of performance;
5. Performance-based assessment of the standards is an
integrated system (neither a checklist or a series od discrete
assessments)
6. Each assessment within the system has performance
criteria against which the performance can be measured
7. Performance criteria identify to what extent the teacher
meets the standard.
8. Student learning is at the heart of the teacher’s
performance.
 The consequences of standards-based
testing and standardized testing
 Consequential validity, i.e., “the evidence and rationales for
evaluating the intended and unintended consequences of score
interpretation and use in both the short- and long-term.”

 The widespread global acceptance of standardized tests (with

their huge gate-keeping role and a high-stakes nature) as valid
procedures for assessing individuals brings with it a set of
positive or negative consequences.
 Negative consequences
1) Test bias
 Standardized tests involve a number of types of test bias in many forms:
language, race, culture, gender, and learning style.
For example:
Reading passage: Selected from a literary piece that reflects a middle-class,
white, Anglo-Saxon norm
Listening stimuli : Selected from lectures that can easily promote a bias
sociopolitical view.
Such tests favor those with great logical-mathematical and verbal-linguistic
intelligence.
Such tests favor those who excel at cognitive styles that are amenable to a
standardized format.

 Solution: We require more formative assessments (such as portfolios, samples

of work, observation reports,…) rather than just summative assessment
inherent in Standardized tests and use multiple measures to reduce test bias.
 2) Test-driven learning and teaching
 Consequences:
1. In such situation, when the students know one single measure of
performance will determine their lives, they may increase a
negative attitude towards learning.

2. Motive is exclusively extrinsic with less likelihood of stirring

intrinsic interests.

3. Both teachers and learners just focus on high performance in

such tests and do anything to pass that exam (test-driven policy).
 Ethical issues
Critical Language Testing/Critical pedagogy

 Shohamy (1997) declares “tests represents a social technology

deeply embedded in education, government, and business; as such
they provide the mechanism for enforcing power and control. They
are most powerful as they are often the single indicators for
determining the future of individuals”

 Test designers have an obligation to maintain certain standards as

specified by their client educational institutions. These standards
being with them certain ethical issues surrounding the gate-keeping
nature of standardized tests.
 Ethical issues (Cont.)
 Proponents of critical approach to language testing claims that
large-scale standardized testing is not an unbiased process, but
rather is the “agent of cultural, social, political, educational, and
ideological agendas that shape the lives of individual participants,
teachers, and learners”.
 Issues mentioned in critical testing:
1. Psychometric traditions are challenged by interpretive,
individualized procedures for predicting success and evaluating
ability;
2. Test designers have a responsibility to offer multiple modes of
performance to account for varying styles and abilities among
test-takers;
3. Tests are deeply embedded in culture and ideology;
4. Test-takers are political subjects in a political context.
 Problems with our test-oriented culture
 Carefully constructed standardized tests designed by reputable
test manufacturers are infallible in their predictive validity. One
standardized test is sufficient; follow-up measures are considered
to be too costly.
 We ignore the fact that tests may by nature be culture-biased. Test
givers are in a position of power over test takers and can impose
their social and political ideologies through standards of
acceptable and unacceptable items;
 We ignore the fact that answers to real-world problems in such
tests are in the form of right and wrong responses and there is no
shades of grey;
 Some say language tests are less susceptible than general
knowledge tests to such sociopolitical overtones.
 Solutions

1. Choose the standardized test which is less culturally biased in

your context

2. Use multiple measures of performance

3. Establish an institutional system of evaluation which places less

emphasis on standardized tests and more on an ongoing process
of formative evaluation.
Thanks for your attention