MATERIALS

Assessment And Teaching

Assessment is a popular and sometimes misunderstood trem in current educational practice. You
might be tempted to think of testing and assessing as synonymous terms, but they are not. Tests
are prepared administrative procedures that occur at idenrifiable times in a curriculum when
learners muster all their fuculties to offer peak performance, knowing that their responses are
being measured and evaluated.
Assessment. on the other hand, is an on going process that encompasses a much wider
domain. Whenever a student responds to a question, offers a comment, or tries out a new word or
Stucture, the teacher subconsciously makes an assessment of the student's performance. Written
work-from a jotted-down phrase to a formal essay-is performance that ultimately is assessed by
self, teacher, and possibly other .students. Reading and listening activities usually require some
sort of productive performance that the teacher implicitly judges, however peripheral that
judgment may be. A good teacher never ceases to assess students, whether those assessments are
incidental or intended .
Tests, then, are a subset 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.
But now, you might be thinking, if you make assessmen ts every time you teach
something in the classroom,does all teaching involve assessment? Are teachers constantly
assessing students with no interaction that is assessment-free?
The answer depends on your perspective. For optimal learning to take place,student in the
classroom must have the freedom to experiment, to tryout their own hypotheses about language
without feeling that their overall competence is being judged in terms of those trials and errors.
In the same way that tournament tennis players must, before a tournament, have the freedom to
practice their skill with no implication for their final placement on thhe day of days, so also must
learners have ample. opportunities to "play" with language in a classroom Without being
formally graded. Teaching sets up the practice games of language learning: the opportunities for
learners to listen. think, take risks, set goals, and process feedback from the "coach” and then
recyde through the skills that they are trying to master.

At the same time, during these practice activities, teachers (and tennis coaches) are indeed
observing students' performance and making varions evaluations of each learner: How did the
performance compare to previous performance? Which aspects of the performance were better
than others? Is the learner pforming up to an expected potential? How does the performance
compare to that of others in the same learning community? In the ideal dassroom, all these
observations feed into the way the teacher provides instruction to each student.

Informal and Formal Assesment

One way to begin untangling the lexical conundnml c reated by distinguishing among tests,
assessment, and teaching is to distinguish between informal and formal assessment. Informal
assessment can take a number of forms, starting with incidental, unplanned comments and
responses, along with coaching and othe r impromptu feedback to the student. Examples include
saying “nice job” “Good work!” “Did you say can or can't?" “l think you meant to say you broke
the glass, not you break the glass," or putting a smile on some homework.
 Informal assessment does not stop there. A good deal of a reacher's informal assessment
is embedded in classroom tasks designed to elicit performance without recording results and
making fixed judgments about a student's competence. Examples at this end of the continuum are
marginal comments on papers, responding to a draft of all essay, advice about how to bener
pronounce a word, a suggestion for a strategy for compensating for a reading difficulty,and
showing how o modify a student’s note-takingto better remember the content of a lecture.
On the other hand, formal assessments are exercises or procedures specifically designed
to tap into a storehouse of skills and knowledge. They are systematic, planned sampling
techniques constructed to give teacher and student an appraisal of student achievement. To
extend the tennis analogy, formal assessments are the tournament games that occur periodically
in the course of a regimen of practice.
Is formal assessment the same as a test? We can say that all tests are formal assessments,
but not all formalal assessment is testing. For example, you might use a student's journal or
portfolio of materials as a formal assessment of the attainment of certain course objectives, but it
is problematic to call those two procedures "tests.”A systematic set of observations of a student's
frequency of oral participation in class is certainly a formal assessment, but it too is hardly what
anyone would call a test. Tests are usually relatively time-constrained (usually spanning a class
period or at moSt several hours) and draw on a limited sample of behavior.

Informal vs. Formal Assessment

With informal assessment, the judgments are integrated with other tasks, e.g., lecturer feedback
on the answer to a question or preceptor feedback provided while performing a bedside
procedure. Informal assessment is most often used to provide formative feedback. As such,
it tends to be less threatening and thus less stressful to the student. However, informal
feedback is prone to high subjectivity or bias. Formal assessment occurs when students are
aware that the task that they are doing is for assessment purposes, e.g., a written
examination. Most formal assessments also are summative in nature and thus tend to have
greater motivation impact and are associated with increased stress. Given their role in
decision-making, formal assessments should be held to higher standards of reliability and
validity than informal assessments (McAlpine 2002).

Formative assesment and summative

Formative assessment is testing that is part of the developmental or ongoing teaching/learning
process. It should include delivery of feedback to the student. It is an evaluation of student
learning that aids understanding and development of knowledge, skills and abilities without
passing any final judgment (via recorded grade) on the level of learning.

Summative assessment is the process of evaluating (and grading) the learning of students at a
point in time. It is testing which often occurs at the end of a term or course, used primarily to
provide information about how much the student has learned and how well the course was taught
(Brown 2003; Hughes 2003; Wojtczak 2002).

Summatieve assesment aims to measure, or summarize, waht a student has grasped, and typically
occurs ay the end of a course or unit of instruction. A summarization of what a student has
learned implies looking back and taking stock of how well that student has accomplished
objectives, but does not necesseraly point the way to future pogress, final exams in a courese and
general proficiency exams are examples of summative assestment.

Formative assessment
The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that
can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning.
More specifically, formative assessments:
o help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need work
o help faculty recognize where students are struggling and address problems immediately
Formative assessments are generally low stakes, which means that they have low or no point
value. Examples of formative assessments include asking students to:
o draw a concept map in class to represent their understanding of a topic
o submit one or two sentences identifying the main point of a lecture
o turn in a research proposal for early feedback

Summative assessment
The goal of summative assessment is to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional
unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark.
Summative assessments are often high stakes, which means that they have a high point value.
Examples of summative assessments include:
o a midterm exam
o a final project
o a paper
o a senior recital

Norm –referenced and criterion- referneced tests

Norm referenced tests, each test taker’s score is interpreted in relation to a mean(average score)
and/or percentile rank. The purpose in such tests is to place test-takers along a mathematical
continuum in rank order, score are usually reported back to the test-taker in the form of a
numerical score ( for example, 230 out of 300) and a percentile rank ( such as 84 percent, which
means that the test—takers score was higher than 84 percent of the total number of test-takers,
but lower than 16 percent in that administration). Typical of norm-referenced tests are
standardized tests like the scholastic aptitude test (SAT) or the test of english as a foreign
language, inteended to be administered to large audiences, with results efficiently disseminated
to test-takers. Such test must have fixed, predetermined responses inn a format that can be scored
uicly at minimum expense, money and efficiency are primary concerns in these tests

Criterion referenced tests, on other hand, are designed to give test takers feedback, usually in the
form of grades, on specific course or lesson objectives. Classroom tests involving the students in
only one classs, and connected to a curiculum, are typical of criterion-referenced testing. Here
much time and effort on the part of the teacher (test administator) are sometimes required in
order to deliver useful, appropriate feedback to students,
Differences of Norm Referenced and Criterion Reference Tests

Norm-Referenced Criterion-Reference

Definition Norm-Referenced tests measure the Criterion-Reference tests measure the

performance of one group of test performance of test takers against the criteria
takers against another group of test covered in the curriculum.
takers.

Purpose To measure how much a test taker To measure how much the test taker known
knows compared to another student. before and after the instruction is finished.

Content Norm-Referenced tests measure Criterion-Reference tests measure the skills

broad skill areas taken from a variety the test taker has acquired on finishing a
of textbooks and syllabi. curriculum.

Item Each skill is tested by less than four Each skill is tested by at least four items to
Characteristics items. The items vary in difficulty. obtain an adequate sample of the student.

Administratio Norm-Referenced tests must be Criterion-Reference tests need not be

n administered in a standardized administered in a standardized format.
format.

Score Norm-Referenced test scores are Criterion-Reference test scores are reported in
reporting reported in a percentile rank. categories or percentage.

Score In Norm-Referenced tests, if a test In Criterion-Reference, the score determines

interpretation taker ranks 95%, it implies that how much of the curriculum is understood by
he/she has performed better than 95% the test taker.
of the other test takers.