Learner assessment and evaluation

Teachers always carry out assessment to measure their learners’ performance and provide them useful feedback. Thus, assessment means measuring students’ performance in any one of many different ways, diagnosing the problems and measuring the progress the students make. Assessment is an estimate, judging the value of learners' knowledge.

Evaluation is viewed much wider. Generally, evaluation is assessing or forming an idea of the amount, quality or value of somebody/something. From the methodological point of view (according to the definition done by Michael Harris and Paul McCann) it is " consideration of all the factors that influence the learning process such as syllabus objectives, course design, materials, methodology, teachers and assessment".

Assessment and evaluation are often linked, because "assessment is one of the most valuable sources of information about what is happening in a learning environment" (Harris & McCann) and it helps us to evaluate this learning environment and students’ performance. Actually, teaching begins when we put an aim. Starting to teach educators have appropriate aims and objectives in mind. Teachers know what they teach for.

For example, the aim of teaching English in schools nowadays is gaining communicative competence. It influences methods / approaches of teaching and teachers have to choose CLT. As the result, the level of communicative competence

achieved should be assessed. Independent testing launched in Ukraine in 2009 assesses both receptive and productive skills on the level prescribed by the Program; therefore, it meets the requirements of communicative teaching. In its turn the type of assessment provided will dictate methods and techniques used in class, they might be far from communicative teaching, which will greatly influence and moreover change the initial aims.

According to Michael Harris and Paul McCann assessment must be subdivided into:

•formal assessment or testing, where test or exam conditions are established;

•informal assessment, carried out by teacher not under special test conditions, but in the normal classroom environment nearly every lesson, hand in hand with learning;

•self-assessment, carried out by students themselves of their own progress and problems.

Informal assessment is important in a classroom setting for measuring productive and receptive skills, their knowledge and ability to use specific structures and vocabulary. Oral and written reception (listening and reading) are normally developed in lockstep fashion. It means that all the students listen to or read one text at the same time. There are different ways of assessing understanding of texts and / or recordings:

•asking questions to recycle what they have heard/read (orally or in written form);

•proposing some speaking activities based on the text;

•using extra-linguistic means (e.g. raising hands, showing pictures, etc.);

•doing matching exercises, etc.

Oral and written production (speaking and writing) needs clear criteria of making reliable and objective judgments about students’ performance. Different researchers and practitioners in the field propose oral assessment criteria which include: fluency (speed/amount of hesitation) and communicative value of speech;

message (relevance and appropriacy) or content of the utterance; accuracy (grammatical and lexical errors); pronunciation (sounds/intonation/stress).

Assessing students' written work can be very time consuming. It is thus very important to choose the most important pieces of writing that students do and not try to assess every piece of written work. Certain writing assessment criteria should be proposed as well, we think it can include: structure and organization of the text; content, the relevance and appropriacy of the message; vocabulary richness, appropriacy, relevant use; accuracy of grammar and lexical structures; spelling.

Any problems that the teacher diagnoses through informal assessment can then be dealt with by remedial presentation or further practice.

Formal assessment /testing should be seen as a complement to other forms of assessment (e.g. informal assessment, self-assessment). The basic differences are that if we have a well designed, reliable and valid test, then the test will measure students' ability in a more objective way than more subjective forms of assessment such as informal observation and self-assessment. In order to be operated successfully in the educational process learner assessment or testing should possess such characteristics as:

Purposefulness - testing should be aimed at certain speech habits and skills which are under estimation, which are measured;

Representativeness - means that testing should cover all language and speech material which is assessed;

Objectiveness - should be provided by objective ways of assessment;

Systematic use - is realized in the process of regular testing.

Providing formal assessment (testing) teacher should be aware of the quality of the testing materials, which should possess the major characteristics of a good test. Firstly, as any other kind of assessment, a good test should be reliable, consistent measure of students' performance. Clear criteria and clear procedures for assessing should be established beforehand. Secondly, assessment tasks should have validity, in other words, to test purposefully what it aims at, rather than testing something else. For example, a reading test where answers are marked for grammatical accuracy is not only a test of reading; it is also a test of writing and grammar as well. The example of low validity test is the following task for measuring writing skill in a general English class: Write an essay 'Is photography an art or a science?' It demands some knowledge of photography. Thirdly, a good test should be practical. It must not be too long to do or mark, be too difficult to organize or involve equipment and resources that are not available. Lastly, it should be clear to students that the tests reflect what they are doing in class, thus hopefully causing a positive washback effect on learning.

Types of test used in educational and examination process depend upon their purposes and aims. If teacher needs to decide what level learners should go into, they propose placement test. If it is important to clear up how learners are getting on at the moment, progress test is used. Diagnostic test is suitable for diagnosing problematic areas. If it is necessary to know how much students have learned over the course, summative tests are used. Different test techniques can be exploited in test design (questions and answers; true/false; multiple choice; gap-filling and completion; matching; dictation; cloze; transformation; rewriting; translation; essay, etc).

Дата добавления: 2017-01-13