Assessing Speaking: another hard task
When
talking about assessing my students' performance, I have always found that the
speaking and writing part are the most difficult ones to grade; and I had not
stopped to think of the reason why that was happening to me. It is just now
that I start to realize that the main problem for that was the lack of setting
the objectives and knowing what I really wanted to measure.
I had not taught for a
long time, and when I did it, it was just like for 6 months, but after having
to design some tests and having to grade them I noticed that I was not doing
the right thing. In the case of speaking, I made some mistakes such as:
·
I did not know what I wanted my students to do: I just came up
with the 20 questions I was asked to submit with the test. I started to review
the book and make all the possible questions but I did not focus on the
functions I wanted my students to perform.
·
I did not have a good organization: I did not set a time limit for
everyone. Some of them had more time, some of them less.
·
It became a mess when I had to grade because I did not know what
to grade and how much “points” I should give to pronunciation, how much to
fluency or how much to grammar.
·
As a consequence of the former, my subjectivity started to appear
but not in a good way. Honestly, I was not being fair with some students. After
having graded everyone’s speaking performance I started to compare results and I
started to think like this: This student has 4 and he is not good when
performing during the class, but this other one had 3.2 and he is very good, so
at the end I started to give more points to the second one in order for him to
have a better grade; and to take away points from the first one, just like
that, without reasons.
I think I am not the only
one who has felt this way, and I have been able to reflect on that
thanks to the information of the book we have been reading. Now I am sure I
will spend more time designing my tests, I will do my best at planning the
goals I want my students to achieve, and not only with the speaking, but with
all the skills, I will try to take into account different performances of my
student during their process when evaluating, instead of being focused on only
one piece of information.
Yes Juli, you're right; you're not the only one that has felt is doing things wrong, I happened to learn since last semester that many things I did at my workplace were not even close to the real teaching labor. We use to design activities that do not fit within our approach, sometimes the way we grade some students is not the same as when I grade some others. It is true that our objectivity is affected when we have not decided beforehand the criteria in which our decisions are going to be based on.
ResponderEliminarI agree with you Juli, having clear objectives is the best way to start planning our assessment tasks. It is important to know what we want to measure and which criteria we are going to apply when scoring. By doing this we will be more objective when grading and our tests will be fair to all students.
ResponderEliminarYes it is true when you mentioned “ the main problem for that was the lack of setting the objectives and knowing what I really wanted to measure.” When we assess speaking, we used to grade our students based on our subjective point , without planning objectives and without taking into account specific goals. For example, the testing of pronunciation is very different from the assessment of spoken grammar or the testing of speaking in meaningful interaction . As teachers, we should focus on construct validity in our tests and plan in advance what we want to assess and be congruent in the moment of assessing students. It means, assessing the things that we have already taught.
ResponderEliminarOf course you´re not the only one who´s ever felt this way, sometimes even we as teacher don´t realize that some of our tasks don´t have any goal, and we just go with same dull and useless activities that are even tough to grade; that is when our commitment with the student and his learning process is not reflected; therefore, we NEED to set a purpose, with specific achievements and all...Moreover, we are the ones in charge of changing this traditional system by keeping in mind those new strategies and being more involved with our tasks, making a real contribution to our education.
ResponderEliminarThat is why I feel bad sometimes, because I am one of those people supposed to change the traditional way of doing things and improve the way the educational system works.
EliminarIt is very important to do what you say, to be more involved in our tasks and to make good and real contributions to the Colombian education.
Juli, I completely understand your point and somehow I do believed that when we are starting we make many mistakes. Maybe,is the lack of confidence in ourselves or it could be the necessity to have the reason while we are grading.The point now, is that we learnt new things so our classes are going to change, you will see. The main important thing to bear in mind is that we must carefully specify scoring procedures to avoid inconsistencies.
ResponderEliminarI am sure things will change. It is important to follow all the new and good things we have been discovering so that we improve our teaching experience, starting by always setting the objectives and what we want to measure from our students.
EliminarWith all the things I've been learning from last semester until now, the only thing I can do is just to feel guilty. Gulty towards my students and guilty towards my profession. I've been discovering so many things I did wrong that, even thought my students learned I think they could have done a better improvement. What I focus the most on is their speaking skills, to lead them to speak, but the tests I designed didn´t evaluate their capabilities and the results were not fair enough. What teachers truly have to do is to set objectives. Objectives to know that they expect from the students, objectives to know what they expect from the class and objectives to know they expect from themselves as educators.
ResponderEliminarI honestly think that "guilty" is the right word. That is what i feel when I start reflecting upon my teaching experience. I'm not saying we have done all things wrong, but I see that all of us need have to improve something in order to be better professionals and help our students in all their learning process.
EliminarI personally think that we followed our teachers' examples, the way they assessed us in throughout our career without knowing further information about the topic. It's just that until this very moment we have discovered all those things, activities and thoughts that made us question not only the way we have been taught so far but also the methods our professores used in us.
ResponderEliminarThat's true. It is just now that we have noticed all those things, and it is now the time to improve our teaching and help our students.
EliminarI agree with you when you say that the skill of speaking is one of the most difficult to assess.
ResponderEliminarI just think we made mistakes at the beginning (at teaching). Just by a matter of ignorance and lack of confidence than other factors I am sure.
But is also true that as human beings, and more important, as teachers, we learn from our past and also from our classes, to take advantages of the theoretical environment we face in order to properly asses our students.
The idea is to start by now to think critically and develop some paths to asses and evaluate our students different skills in a responsible and accurate way.