InTASC STANDARD 8: The student understands and uses a variety of instructional strategies

to encourage learners to develop deep understanding of content areas and their connections, and
to build skills to apply knowledge in meaningful ways.
Name of Artifact: Final Reflective Essay-Testing and Assessment
Course: TSL 633 H001 Testing and Assessment
Date: Summer 2018
TESOL Standards Addressed: 3c, 3e, 4a, 4b
Rationale:
TSL 633 was a class not only about summative assessments, or traditional tests, but about
formative assessments, or activities leading to mastery of a linguistic ability. I have included as
an artifact for standard eight my final reflective essay on both testing and my understanding of
multiple means of assessment. In this essay, I display my understanding of strategies to instruct
and assess linguistic knowledge. One of the particular areas I focus on is how to make a variety
of instructional strategies, for enrichment purposes, complex rather than difficult. Instead of
trying to trick students while assessing them, I should be giving them new ways to use their
knowledge for practical purposes. The new tasks should directly relate to old knowledge This is
also commonly known as scaffolding. Smit, van Eerde, and Bakker (2013) offer:
One setting in which whole-class scaffolding has been investigated concerns multilingual
classrooms. Over the last few decades scholars in the field of content-based language
instruction (Echevarria et al., 2008; Gibbons, 2002, 2009) have argued that scaffolding
language is a fruitful way of promoting multilingual pupils’ development of subject-
specific registers needed at school (p. 818).
An example of such a practice within my own classes has been making the unit of numbers in
Spanish more complex. Students that know their numbers could easily bore of a unit on numbers
that solely makes use of them for counting. However, within my class, students have learned to
use numbers over 100 to say the year, to play games like Bingo and Monopoly, and to solve
multiplication problems. In addition to learning how to say the dates, using numbers to play
games, and using numbers for mathematical purposes, students have made use of numbers for
telling time. In this way, students learn both content and linguistic skills through a variety of
instructional activities.
Within the paper, I also reflect on the five principles of language assessment- practicality,
reliability, validity, authenticity, and washback. The last subject that I intend to focus on within
my classes is that of verb conjugation. Students have been using conjugated verbs in other
scenarios and thus have some memorized but do not yet know the patterns behind conjugation.
Using verb conjugations in phrases useful in the classroom setting, in telling time, and in talking
about the weather have already caused them to see the practicality of conjugating verbs- they
need them for the smallest of utterances! I make sure that the assessments I give, no matter how
variable, are reliable. To illustrate, I created multiple assessment where students would be
required to talk about weather. The domain I wanted to focus on was speaking. Therefore, I
created opportunities for students to speak about the weather, so that I could assess their
progress. One activity involved them using their weather apps on their phones to tell current
weather. Another activity involved them looking at pictures of various weather conditions and
describing them aloud. Both activities were reliable means of instructional strategies, or
assessment, because they consistently and naturally measured the students’ abilities to speak
about a particular topic.

Reference
Smit, J., A. A. van Eerde, H., & Bakker, A. (2013). A conceptualisation of whole-class
scaffolding. British Educational Research Journal, 39(5), 817–834. https://doi-
org.lynx.lib.usm.edu/10.1002/berj.3007