Principles of language assessment

A reflection

As time has gone by and new methodologies on education have been implemented, I have seen (like all of you) how different ways of teaching, different materials, and technologies have taken place in the classroom in order to improve the teaching and learning process. However, I think that talking about assessment we are a little behind and we still, as teachers and as students, continue evaluating and being evaluated in the same ways than some years before. 

It is common to find that kind of tests where students are asked to fill in blanks with memorized vocabulary that may not be meaningful, or with conversations that never happen in the real world; also, tests with readings that have nothing to do with the contents of the syllabus or long tests that make students race against the clock. These are examples of tests that do not fulfill one or more of the five principles of language assessment mentioned by Brown (2000), which are:

Practicality: a practical test is not very expensive, it is easy to administer, it doesn’t consume lots of time neither for the student to take it nor for the examiner to evaluate it.

Reliability: a reliable test is consistent. It means that if you administer the same test to the same student or group of students on two different occasions, the test should have similar results.

Validity: it refers to the extent to which the judgments made from assessment results are appropriate, meaningful, and useful in terms of the purpose of the assessment. A valid test should measure what it really wants to evaluate.

Authenticity: an authentic test is one that measures with tasks that can be enacted in the real world.

Washback: effective tests have an effect on teaching and learning.

If these are the characteristics of good and effective tests, I have to say that the ones that I have been evaluated with have not fulfilled the five principles. Some of them did not have any relationship with real tasks, others did not measured what they were supposed to evaluate; and some others were excessively expensive or time consuming. Also, after reading this chapter, I realized that many of the exams that I have designed have not had all the principles, and sometimes as a beginner teacher I only tried to meet the requirements and to design tests because the due date was coming and I had to do it without really think of the effectiveness that they could have on students’ performance.

Now, after the reading and the reflection done, I know that it is important to think of different aspects when designing an exam. It is not only a matter of finding out how to evaluate all the contents seen in class, but it is also important to try to keep the balance with all the five principles in order to make effective tests.

Assessment, evaluation, testing and grading

A summary

According to Scanlan (2012), there exists a limited conception of the term assessment among many teachers. He pointed out that it is considered as simply “…giving students tests and assigning them grades” (p. 1) while its real meaning involves more than that and has significant importance in the teaching/learning process.

As a general definition, he indicated that assessment is a process that consists of making a judgment of worth of any entity. In the case of the education field, he referred to educational and learner assessment. The first was described as a process that “involves gathering and evaluating data evolving from planned learning activities or programs” (also known as evaluation), and the second defined as a particular type of educational assessment designed with different purposes such as motivating and directing learning, providing feedback to student and providing feedback to teachers and instructors.

After describing the different types of assessment, Scanlan noted the distinction between assessment and evaluation stating that “…it is often said that we assess students and we evaluate instruction” (p. 3). This means that assessment is done during the students learning process in order to improve their performance and evaluation is carried out with the aim of judging the worth of educational activities.

In order to conclude, the author indicated that grading can be considered a component of assessment since it is a judgment of the quality of a student performance, and also described that it is most of the times a formal, summative, final and product oriented judgment (Scanlan, 2012,p. 4).