TESTING, ASSESSING, AND TEACHING

1. TESTING, ASSESSING, AND TEACHING WHAT IS A TEST? A method of measuring a person’s ability, knowledge, or performance in a given domain. METHOD An instrument – a set of techniques, procedures, or items – that requires performance on the test-taker. The method must be explicit and structured, e.g.: Multiple-choice questions --- prescribed correct answers A writing prompt --- scoring rublic An oral interview --- a questions scripts and a checklist of expected responses

2. Measure • A test must measure --- general ability or specific ability • The way the results or measurements are communicated may vary, e.g.: a letter grade, a total numerical scores, a percentile rank, and sub-scores. • If a instrument does not specify a form of reporting measurement that technique cannot appropriately be defined as a test.

3. A Person’s/individual’s ability • A test measure an individual’s ability, knowledge, or performance --- testers need to understand • Who the test-takers are • What is their previous experience and background • Is the test appropriately matched to their abilities • How should test-takers interpret their scores

4. Domain • A test measure a given domain, e.g.: • A proficiency test – general competence in all skills of a language • More specific criteria, e.g.: a test of pronunciation might well be a test of only a limited set of phonemic minimal pairs, a vocabulary test may focus on only the set of words covered in a particular lesson. A WELL-CONSTRUCTED TEST IS AN INSTRUMENT THAT PROVIDES AN ACCURATE MEASURE OF THE TEST-TAKER’S ABILITY WITHIN A PARTICULAR DOMAIN

5. ASSESSMENT AND TEACHING • People might be tempted to think of testing and assessing as synonymous terms, but they are not. • Tests are prepared administrative procedures that occur at identifiable times in a curriculum when learners muster all their faculties to offer peak performance, knowing that their responses are being measured and evaluated. • Assessment is an ongoing process that encompasses a much wider domain, e.g.: a student responds a question, offers a comment, or tries out a new word or structure, the teacher subconsciously makes an assessment of the students’ performance. • Tests are a subtest of assessment; they are certainly not the only form of assessment that a teacher can make. • Tests can be useful devices, but they are only one among many procedures and tasks that teachers can ultimately use to assess students.

6. TEACHING Figure 1 Test, Assessment, and Teaching ASSESSMENT TEST

7. Ways of the teacher provides instruction: Informal and formal assessment • Informal assessment can take a number of forms – incidental, unplanned comments and responses, along with coaching and other impromptu feedback to the student. • A good deal of a teacher’s informal assessment is embedded in classroom tasks designed to elicit performance without recording results and fixed judgments about a student’s competence. • E.g.: informal assessment in forms of marginal comments on papers, responding to a draft of an essay.

8. Informal and formal assessment (continued) • Formal assessments are exercises or procedures specially designed to tap into a storehouse of skills and knowledge. • They are systematically planned sampling techniques constructed to give teacher and student appraisal of student achievement. • Is formal assessment the same as a test? We can say all tests are formal assessment, but not all formal assessment is testing. • They can be in the forms of student’s journal or portfolio. • A systematic set of observations of a student’s frequency of oral participation in class is certainly a formal assessment. • Tests are usually relatively time-constrained and draw on a limited sample of behavior.

9. The function: Formative and summative assessment • Formative assessment is evaluating students in the process of “forming” their competencies and skills with the goal of helping them to continue that growth process. • Keys: formation is the delivery (by the teacher) and internalization (by the student) of appropriate feedback on performance, with an eye toward the future continuation (of formation) of learning. • Summative assessment aims to measure, or “summarize” what a student has grasped, and typically occurs at the end of a course or unit of instruction. • A summation of what a student has learned implies looking back and taking stock of how well that student has accomplished objectives, but does not necessarily point the way to future progress. • Final exams in a course and general proficiency exams are examples of summative assessment.

10. Norm-referenced and criterion-referenced tests • In norm-references tests, each test-taker’s score is interpreted in relation to a mean (average score), median (middle score), and standard deviation (extent of variance in scores), and/or percentile rank. • The purpose in such tests is to place test-takers along a mathematical continuum in rank order. • Scores are usually reported back to the test-takers in the form of a numerical scores (e.g., 230 out of 300). • Typical of norm-referenced test are standardized tests like TOEFL. • The tests must have fixed, predetermined responses in a format that can be scored quickly at minimum expense.

11. Norm-referenced and criterion-referenced tests (continued) • Criterion-referenced tests are designed to give test-takers feedback, usually in the form of grades, on specific course or lesson objective. • Classroom tests involving the students in only one class, and connected to a curriculum, are typical of criterion-referenced testing. • In a criterion-referenced tests, the distribution of students’ scores across a continuum may be of little concern as long as the instrument assesses appropriate objective.

12. Discrete-point and integrative testing • Discrete-point tests are constructed on the assumption that language can be broken down into its component parts and that those parts can be tested successfully. • The components are like the skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and other various units of language. • Integrative tests are constructed on the assumption that communicative competence is so global and requires such integration. • There are two kinds of tests commonly used applied integrative assumption: cloze test and dictation test.

13. Communicative language testing • In order for a particular language test to be useful for its intended purposes, test performance must correspond in demonstrable ways to language use in non-test situations. • So a quest for authenticity was launched, as test designers centered on communicative performance. • Strategic competence and pragmatic competence are needed to be included in language tests. • Communicative testing presented challenges to test designers: • testers need to identify real-world task that language learners were called upon to perform. • The contexts for those tasks were extraordinarily widely varied. • The sampling tasks for any one assessment procedure needed to be validated. • The assessment field became more and more concerned with the authenticity of tasks and the genuineness of texts.

14. Performance –based assessment • In an English language-teaching context, performance-based assessment means that you may have a difficulty time distinguishing between formal and informal assessment. • A characteristic of many (but not all) performance-based assessments is the presence of interactive tasks. • The assessments involve learners in actually performing the behavior that we want to measure. • In interactive tasks, test-takers are measured in the act of speaking, requesting, responding, or in combining listening and speaking, e.g., oral interview and in integrating reading and writing.

16. The Essay-translation Approach • Tests commonly referred to as the pre-scientific stage of language testing • No special skill or expertise required • Subjective judgment of the teacher is considered to be of paramount importance • Tests usually consist of essay writing, translation, and grammatical analysis • Tests also have a heavy literary and cultural biases

17. The structuralist approach • The view that language learning is chiefly concerned with the systematic acquisition of a set of habits • Tests measure separate elements of the target language, e.g., phonology, vocabulary, grammar • Mastery of language elements is tested using words and sentences divorced from any context. • Test measure separate the skills of language, e.g., listening, speaking, reading, writing

18. The integrative Approach • The testing of language in context and thus is concerned primarily with meaning and the total communication effect of discourse. • The tests are often designed to assess the learner’s ability to use two or more skills simultaneously. • The tests are concerned with a global view of proficiency. • The tests are best characterized by the use of Cloze testing and of Dictation.

19. Communicative Approach • Communicative tests are concerned primarily with how language is used in communication. • Most aim o incorporate tasks which appropriate as closely as possible to those facing the students in real life. • Communicative tests are based on a view of language referred to the divisibility hypothesis. • They result in an attempt to obtain different profiles of a learner’s performance in the language.