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.