Hi visitors, in this post you will find information about these three fundamental concepts in the ELT field: evaluation, assessment, and testing. Also, you will see a Prezi presentation I made upon the same very topic. I hope you can find it useful for further teaching scenarios.
In
the English Language Teaching field there is a process that we cannot omit.
Such process involves planning, detecting problems, and making accurate
decisions, as well as using the proper materials. We are talking about
evaluating our English students.
First, we need to know what
evaluation is. As Overton (2011) explains “the evaluation process is composed
by procedures to establish whether the students meet a preset criterion.” This
process involves three main steps: planning, information gathering and
interpretation, and the decision-action stage.
The planning stage demands the
teacher to decide how he is going to evaluate his students and which tools are
going to be used. Moreover, he needs to take into consideration the learners’
interests and abilities before creating the criterion. At the end, it is
essential to present it to them. By doing so, there will be no
misunderstandings at the end of the course.
The second step is where the teacher
observes how his students are performing during classes. We need to point out
that these processes can be carried out by both the teacher and the students.
By letting students evaluating their own work we will have a chance of changing
the strategies for better outgrowths.
Finally, at the decision-action step
the teacher reports his students about their development during the course. This
can be conveyed by giving them feedback and suggestions on how they can improve
their skills. Depending on the level, it can be useful to communicate with
their parents about the results.
We need to make sure we are
evaluating the four main skills: reading, writing, listening, and speaking; and
for this, we have many techniques that we can easily apply in our lessons. Some
of them depend on the level of our students and may not be suitable for all
ages.
For instance, to evaluate the
reading skills we can have them reading an agenda and then asking for specific
information. Another activity we can implement is to have them reading aloud a
text with no punctuation, and then, we can ask them to put the missing
punctuation marks. Also, we have the most common exercises that are reading
comprehension after having read a text.
Moving on to the writing skills, we
can show them some street signs and then ask them to interpret what they mean
in a written form. Moreover, they can write a summary of their favorite chapter
of a book and create its cover page. This activity will promote their ability
to summarize a text.
Going forward, in order to evaluate
our students’ listening skills we can use dictation exercises. It might be
necessary for us to repeat a couple of times the text for them to fully
understand it. Furthermore, the use of minimal pairs for them to discriminate
the different English sounds works very effectively.
Lastly, we can grade their speaking
skills by asking them to explain the process of how to do something. Depending
on the students’ level it will be the complexity of such process. Something else we can use for polishing their
pronunciation is to have blending activities, where students match the sound
with the correct
picture.
Having stated what evaluation is and
the different techniques for doing it in our classrooms, we need to take a look
at one form of evaluation: assessment.
Overton (2011) refers to assessment as “a
process of gathering information to monitor students’ progress and make
educational decisions, if necessary.” As explained before, at this stage the
teacher must be aware of the improvement and development of his learners in
order to change the learning path.
Additionally, we need to point out
its importance in language learning. By assessing our students we “can direct
our students learning and help them to become more effective self-directed
learners” (Kizlik, 2012).
Now, let us see some alternatives for assessing our
students.
For instance, we can ask a student
to go to the front and perform physically an action or a command. Then, we can
have the rest of the class assessing him by giving him ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs
down’, according to the participation.
Another alternative is to draw K-W-L charts
on the board. This stands for ‘what I know, what I want to know, and what I
learned. This is a form of self-assessment and can be done by the end of each
unit in order to measure their understanding of the content.
A different way of assessing students is to
ask them for oral or written reports. At the end of a topic students turn in a
written summary of the key points they covered and reports what he learned. They
can also do it orally in a face-to-face interview with the teacher.
The fourth alternative is to use portfolios.
These are going to reflect if the students worked during the course and how
they performed. Portfolios help the teacher to keep track of what he asked in
the school year and demonstrate the students’ commitment to the subject.
Now it is time to check a form of assessment:
testing. Overton (2011) states that testing “is a method used to determine
students’ ability to complete a task, to demonstrate mastery of a skill, and to
prove students’ knowledge of content.” In this line, we should see what the
characteristics of a good test are.
The
first feature of a good test is to be valid. This is to say, it measures what
is supposed to measure. The second one is to be reliable. This means that the
results that it shows are repeated constantly. Furthermore, it has to be
comprehensive. In other words, that the test covers all the content of the
unit.
Also, it must be appropriate in difficulty,
neither too easy nor too hard. Moreover, it should be clear. It is recommended
to have simple instructions and questions to prevent confusions. Along with
that, it needs to be designed to be finished in a given time.
Finally, it should be economic. This means
that the teacher should grade it on time and return it to students. These are
the seven main points that our tests should have.
In short, we need to
choose carefully the procedures which we are going to use to set the grading criteria
as well as we need to be aware of their learning process. These, combined with
the correct methods of evaluation will allow us to determine whether our
students mastered the skills and knowledge that our course demanded. Likewise,
we will be able to measure how and what our students learn, and in case of
complications during the course, we will be able to develop strategies to help
them improve their abilities.
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