Unit 2 Traditional and Alternative Assessment

In this second unit, we will discuss what traditional assessment is and how alternative
assessment can provide you with more opportunities to gather evidence of your students´
learning. We will talk about how to use discussions, interviews, role plays, portfolios, projects,
observations and checklists, and more in your assessment process. I´m sure this unit will have an
impact in your teaching. Enjoy it!

Competencies:

By the end of this Unit, students will be able to:

• Delineate what alternative assessment is, how it supports learning and its key features;
• Differentiate between traditional and alternative assessment;
• Illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of traditional and alternative assessment;
• Recognize alternative assessment methods to assess linguistic and communicative
ability;
• Enumerate a broad range of assessment strategies, indicating their characteristics,
assessment procedures, and how they assist students in learning;
• Highlight the significance of self and peer assessment and demonstrate how they are
used with alternative assessment strategies; and
• Design a range of alternative assessment procedures and assess their effectiveness in
assessing students’ performance.
Content of the Unit:

1. Introduction
2. Traditional and alternative assessment: main differences
3. Traditional and alternative assessment: advantages and drawbacks
4. Alternative assessment: Delineation and central features
5. Alternative assessment methods and their purpose and how they look in practice.
a. Questioning and quizzes
b. Discussions, interviews, role plays and presentation
c. Portfolio and projects
d. Observations and checklists
e. Self- and peer-assessment
6. Summary and conclusions
7. Assessment plan
8. References

Estimated Time: 10 hours.

Assessment Plan

In order to successfully complete your work on this Unit you will be asked to do two
assessment tasks:

Unit 2 Final Task; this task represents 5 points of the overall grade. You will
submit this task through the UAS platform.

Unit 2 Discussion FORUM, this forum represents 5 points of the overall grade.
You will complete this forum on the UAS Platform.
 1. Introduction

In the previous unit we defined assessment as the systematic process of collecting, analyzing,
and acting upon data related to student learning (Huba & Freed, 2000). We also discussed issues
related to summative and formative assessment and we challenged you to analyze your current
assessment practices, do you remember?

In this unit, we will would like to go beyond traditional assessment practices by integrating
alternative assessment to our discussion and analyze what it is and the possible advantages and
disadvantages if compared to traditional assessment. However, in order to do it, you need to
know what alternative assessment is and what we mean by traditional assessment.

But before we do that, answer the following question that will help us introduce this unit:

Stop and think: How often do you use tests to measure your students´
achievement? Are tests part of your assessment method? to what extent
are they useful in providing you with reliable evidence of your students´
learning?

So, let´s start with the first section of this unit. Are you ready? I hope so!
 2. Traditional and alternative assessment: main differences

For the purpose of this section traditional assessment is referred as to written testing, such as
multiple choice, matching, true/false, fill in the blank, etc. Traditional assessment must typically
be completed within a specific amount of time. There is a single correct response for each item,
etc.

Traditional assessment in ELT involves:

• the use of tests of all kinds (multiple choice, gap fill, cloze tests, matching, true / false,
information transfer, etc.)
• essay writing and,
• oral assessment (question-answer or interview with the student, creating a dialogue on
a given situation, participating in a debate, etc.)

Have you used the ones above? If you answered “yes”, well, you have used traditional assessment
too.

Is it wrong? Not really; however, most tests are usually not interactive, and they do not reflect
real life experiences. For instance, it is very common to find an exercise where we ask students
to transform an active sentence into a passive form, but they will not commonly do this in real
life.

Despite of these limitations, testing provides us with objective, valid and reliable information
that can be used to determine the level of achievement of a language student.
 Task 1)

Step 1) read the following quote from (Butterfield et al, 1999).

Language testing, regardless of its purpose, is a key component of every instructional

program. Critics, however, have raised serious concerns about the usefulness of various
kinds of tests as the primary measure of student achievement

Step 2) Answer the following question: Do you think tests are useful? Do you agree
with the use of tests to measure your students´ achievement?

Some authors consider traditional techniques such as multiple-choice tests, true-false

statements, fill in the gaps and matching exercises inappropriate for the foreign language
classroom curricula. More specifically, they point out the lack of rich, descriptive information
about both the product and process of learning in conventional testing methods (Barootchi &
Keshavarz, 2002).

They argue, for instance, that true-false tests present two choices one of which is true. They are
simple indicators of what is understood and offer students a 50% chance of getting the answer
correct.
Same argument, when matching exercises are analyzed, we identify that the main advantage is
that they are compact in terms of space and eliminate, to some extent, the guessing factor. The
main disadvantage is that they mainly measure passive vocabulary knowledge but no other
complex language skills.

Stop and think: How often do you use true / false or matching in your tests
or in your exercises in the classroom?

You might feel a little bit confused and you might be thinking that there are advantages in the
use of those testing items to measure a wide variety of learning points (and I agree); some
advantages are, for instance:

1. They are useful for measuring a number of different kinds of precise learning points
(Brown & Hudson)
2. They are objective (Brown & Hudson; Simking & Kuechler, 2005),
3. They are convenient (Rowley, 1974); and
4. Large numbers of test takers can take them, a large number of questions can be asked,
they are to student advantage, student anxiety is reduced, inconsistent grading is
avoided, and timely feedback is offered.

However, we are criticizing those items since they are quite dissimilar to real-life language usage.

Some disadvantages are:

• Standard tests are not able to “accurately and fairly measure student understanding of
course concepts (Simking & Kuechler, 2005, p. 74);
 • They cannot represent real-life language (Brown & Hudson, 1998),
• They offer students success due to guessing (Henning et al., 1981).
• They cannot “adequately document learner strengths or caaptural actual progress”
(Balliro, 1993, p. 558), and,
• They “cannot on their own tell teachers much about how learners are acquiring academic
contents”.

Thus, as suggested by Barootchin and Keshavarz (2002): “these instruments, if used as the sole
indicators of ability and/or growth, may generate faulty results (p.280)

Stop and think: If you are using traditional testing, you might not be
gathering the evidence that you “truly” need to determine students´
achievement.

Many teachers would agree that the ultimate goal of language teaching is to make students able
to use the target language in meaningful, real life situations. Thus, if your major goal is to help
students develop communicative skills, then students´ performance using those skills should be
tested.

Typically, in tests with a traditional selected-response items, students do not generate any
language. This type of items is useful and more often used to measure receptive skills. These
items offer a number of advantages as they are quick to administer and really easy to score and
that scoring is objective. However, they fail to check / measure students productive language
skills. If, students recognize that productive skills are not tested they will focus their attention
and efforts to the development of the skills truly tested (receptive).
Students do not generally spend time on non-assessed academic work. Students can decide how
much time should be spent on what is considered important. In other words, students take cues
on what is important and what is not important based on what is assessed.

Stop and think: if your assessment is mainly traditional, we can anticipate

that you might be concerned but more importantly you might be (by now)
open to the integration of different options to measure your students´
abilities in the target language. The option is called: alternative assessment.

Task 2)

Step 1) As you read the quotes below, in order to get understanding of alternative
assessment, highlight key terms that you find useful:

Step 2) After you highlight the terms you will be asked to create your own definition
of alternative assessment.

• McNamara (2001) sees it as a movement “away from the use of standardized multiple-
choice tests in favor of more complex performance-based assessments” (p. 329).
• Lynch (2003) notes that alternative assessment “views language ability and use as a
reality (or realities) that do not exist independently of our attempts to know them” (p.
6).
• The purpose of alternative assessment is to collect information on and document the
abilities, skills, progress, and attitudes of the students (Varela, 1997).

• Alternative assessment offers the teachers a chance to realize their students'

weaknesses and strengths in variant situations (Law & Eckes, 1995).
 • In alternative assessment,
o (a) learners acquire problem solving and higher-level thinking skills,
o (b) real-world contexts or simulations are utilized, and
o (c) both process and products are focused on (Norris et al., 1998).
• Procedures of alternative assessment include checklists, journals, logs, videotapes and
audiotapes, self-evaluation, teacher observations, portfolios, conferences, diaries, self-
assessments, and peer assessments and so on (Brown & Hudson, 1998).
• Alternative assessment can have a lot contribution in FL teaching. It can provide valuable
information about learners’ performance in educational contexts (Barootchi &
Keshavarz, 2002);
• it “connects students’ experiences with the curriculum through active involvement”,
and has “students produce original work around major themes, ideas, or issues”,
encouraging deep learning and supporting in-depth teaching (Gottlieb, 2006, p. 111, 123);
• and it can minimize the bad washback effect of standardized tests, helping align
classroom assessment and classroom activities with authentic, real-life activities (Norris
et al., 1998).

Step 3) write your own definition for alternative assessment:

Step 4) Compare your definition to the one provided by Jonassen, (1991):

Alternative assessment is the use of tools that focus on assessing the process of learning,
higher-order thinking skills, knowledge constructions and ability to apply the knowledge in
flexible contexts rather than an assessment of task completion and factual knowledge through
standardized test (Jonassen, 1991)

As we have seen “alternative assessment offers the teachers a chance to realize their students´
weaknesses and strengths in variant situations (Law & Eckers, 1995).

According to Reeves (2000) there are two major approaches in alternative assessment: 1)
performance or authentic assessment and, 2) portfolio assessment.

1. Performance or authentic assessment

Performance refers to a student´s generation of a response that may be directly or indirectly

observed. Authentic refers to the nature of the task which presents a real-world issue (Elliot,
1995)

Bailey (1998) points out the potential benefits of performance test by referring to their highly
contextualized nature.

Authentic tests link instructions and the real-world experience of any given learning through
meaningful tasks (Simonson et al, 2000).

Winking (1997) claims that authenticity of the tasks urges the learner to resort to higher
order thinking skills to solve real-life problems.

Such assessment includes, for instance: interviews, presentations, constructed response

questions that require critical thinking as opposed to prescribed, predictable responses,
demonstrations, etc.

2. Portfolio assessment.

This assessment includes two major techniques labeled as portfolios and projects.
 a) Portfolios involve student work with a display mastery of skills in relation to the task
hand (Kulieke et al, 1990). It is a goal-oriented collection of student work which
displays students´ efforts and progress in a given subject area (Bailey, 1998).

Portfolio assessment is the collection of many iterations of a paper or a project that show
student development and growth. These are process oriented portfolios. Product oriented
portfolios focus on the best work of the student in a particular learning unit or discipline or
concept.

b) A project is similarly a goal-oriented task which is realized in any form of plan

development, research proposal and art work which requires learners to use their
own skills and strategies to solve a problem (Simonson et al, 2000).

Stop and Think: how often do you use alternative assessment in your
language classroom? Are you familiarized with its use? Have you seen
any benefits?

I´m sure you have used it as it is very common nowadays; however due to its cumulative nature,
this kind of assessment calls for more responsibility on the part of the students and more
commitment on the part of the teachers (Bailey, 1998). It is laborious on the part of the teacher
as it consumes more time and energy to make decisions on the values of the diverse products
that the students present (Bailey, 1998).

Let´s finish this section by summarizing the main differences between traditional assessment and
alternative assessment.
 Traditional
One-shot, standardizes exams
Timed, multiple choice format
Decontextualized test items
Focus on right answer
Summative
Oriented to product
Non-interactive performance
Fosters extrinsic motivation
Alternative
Continuous long-term assessment
Untimed, free response format
Contextualized communicative
tasks
Open-ended, creative answers
Formative
Interactive performance
Fosters intrinsic motivation

In the coming section, we will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both.

3. Traditional and alternative assessment: advantages and

drawbacks
In the previous section, we indirectly addressed different advantages and disadvantages of
traditional and alternative assessment, do you remember any?

Task 4) advantages and disadvantages

Step 1) Complete the following chart with ideas you have consolidated so far!

Traditional Assessment
Advantages Disadvantages
Easy to check Lack of interaction

Alternative Assessment
Advantages Disadvantages
Real-life tasks Time-consuming

Let us share with you our findings, you can always compare our list to your list and add elements
or expand your list.
Traditional Assessment:
Disadvantages
• Students do not generate any language.
• High quality tests are difficult to construct
• It fails to check students´ productive language skills
• Students´ scores are compared against one another.
• It doesn´t pay attention to the process, only to the product.
• It doesn´t truly reflect learners´ performance.
• It doesn´t allow the student to express knowledge in personal terms or to demonstrate
creativity.
• It doesn´t measure high order thinking skills.

Despite of this long list of disadvantages there are positive aspects to consider:

Advantages:
• You can measure different kids of precise learning points.
• They are objective
• They are convenient
• A large number of questions can be asked.
• Student anxiety is reduced
• Inconsistent grading is avoided

Alternative Assessment:

Advantages:
• It requires students to perform, create, produce, or do something (Winters, 1992 p. 6)
 • Ensure that people, not machines, do the scoring, using human judgement (Herman and
Aschbacher, 19992)
• It collects abilities, skills, progress and attitudes of students (Varela, 1997)
• Learners acquire problem solving and higher level of thinking skills, real-world contexts
or simulations are utilized, and both process and products are focused on (Norris et al.
1998)
• It aligns classroom assessment and classroom activities with authentic, real-life activities
(Norris et al, 1998)

Disadvantage:
A number of concerns are raised about certain features of alternative assessment.
• Firstly, it is argued that this kind of assessment is more time-consuming and costly for
teachers to have a thoughtful analysis of the tests to provide accurate feedback to the
learners (Brindley, 2001).
• Second, teachers must be skillful enough to be able to implement different methods of
alternative assessment successfully (Clark & Gipps, 2000).
• Third, learners also require a great deal of guidelines and supervisions which is not
realized if they are accustomed to traditional assessment practices.
• Forth, this kind of assessment is open to criticism in terms of psychometric qualities of
validity, reliability and practicality (Brown & Hudson, 1998).

Above all, practitioners have doubts about the possibility of the true application of this kind of
assessment to largescale classes (Worthen, 1993).

Task 5)
Step 1) Look at the following image
Step 2) Do you agree with the assessment used in the picture above? Elaborate on
your answer

I think that “one needs to consider who are the agents undertaking the tests and the best time
to assess (Brown & Knight, 1996). In order to choose appropriately our testing item, let´s analyze
how they are constructed.

4. Alternative assessment: Delineation and central features

There are three key characteristics that distinguishes performance assessment from other types
of tests:
a) Examinees must perform tasks
b) The tasks should be as authentic as possible, and
c) Success or failure in the outcome of the tasks, because they are performances, musts
usually be rated by qualified judges.

Then you must be wonder: what should a performance assessment look like?

For the purpose of this unit, the task should:

a) Be based on needs analysis (including student input) in terms of rating criteria, content,
and contexts.
b) Be as authentic as possible with the goal of measuring real-world activities.
c) Sometimes have collaborative elements that stimulate communicative interaction
d) Be contextualized and complex
e) Integrated skills with content
f) Be appropriate in terms of number, timing, and frequency of assessment
g) Be generally non-intrusive, that is, be aligned with the daily actions in the language
classroom.

Bergen (1994), Oakland & Hambleton (1995) argued that alternative assessment should exhibit
the following:
 • Contribute to instructional development,
• Be based on an integrated approach,
• Have intrinsic value
• Involve learners in meaningful and motivating activities
• Promote greater accountability from all stakeholders
• Be able to accommodate a variety of learning styles
• Focus on the learning process,
• Provide structures for teacher development.

Task 6) Which ones will you consider the most important features of alternative
assessment tasks?

In this last section of the unit, we will talk about how to create alternative assessment task and
we will provide you with ideas of possible tasks that you can integrate into your assessment
practices.

5. Alternative assessment methods and their purpose and how

they look in practice.
Brigham Young University has created a great set of guidelines for constructing alternative
assignments:

Step 1) Define a concrete and unambiguous instructional outcome/goal that you want
to assess.

Step 2) Make sure that you include both subject-matter content and a set of
skills/operations that a successful student would exhibit.

Step 3) Define what can be assessed through performance assessment, and what can
be assessed through objective performance measures.

Step 4) Create tasks/assignments that elicit this behavior. • Decide what kind of
guidance you can provide while still allowing students to learn independently.

Step 5) Try the assessment out and make revisions as necessary.

Pay attention to the steps above, as they will be the foundation of the end of
unit task.

Some additional questions to ask yourself, when you are deciding on what assessment to
choose:
 • Do you want to test acquisition of content knowledge, or the ability to apply that
knowledge? Such a question, don’t ‘you think?
• Do you want to assess a product that a student has produced, or the process by which
they produced it?
• Do you want to assess any of the following: writing ability, speaking skills, creativity, use
of technology, or collaboration?
• Are specific time constraints important?
• What kind of content knowledge should students be able to demonstrate and at what
level?
• What higher order thinking skills do you want students to develop and be able to
demonstrate?
• Which assessment methods would allow you to understand how well students are
achieving learning outcomes? Did you include more than one assessment type in your
course?

Stop and Think: How often do you commonly ask yourself the questions
listed above?

If this is the first-time don´t feel ashamed, there is always a first time for everything. The most
important reaction is: what would you do now that you are aware of alternative assessment? Let`s
see some of the options you can use from now on.
 Task 7) Here is a list of alternative assessment strategies that you may want
to consider. Highlight the ones you are familiar with!

Although, there are many, we would like to introduce some of them.

a) Portfolio

According to Genesee and Upshur (1996), a portfolio is "a purposeful collection of students'
work that demonstrates ... their efforts, progress, and achievements in given areas" (p. 99).

Portfolios include materials such as

• essays and compositions in draft and final forms;

• reports, project outlines;
• poetry and creative prose;

• artwork, photos, newspaper or magazine clippings;

• audio and/or video recordings of presentations, demonstrations, etc.;
• journals, diaries, and other personal reflections;
 • tests, test scores, and written homework exercises;
• notes on lectures; and
• self- and peer-assessments--comments, evaluations, and checklists.

Until recently, portfolios were thought to be applicable only to younger children who assemble
a portfolio of artwork and written work for presentation to a teacher and/or a parent. Now
learners of all ages and in all fields of study are benefiting from the tangible, hands-on nature of
portfolio development.

The advantages of engaging students in portfolio development have been extolled in a number
of sources (Genesee & Upshur, 1996; O'Malley &Valdez Pierce, 1996; Brown & Hudson, 1998;
Weigle, 2002).

A synthesis of those characteristics gives us a number of potential benefits.

Portfolios

• foster intrinsic motivation, responsibility, and ownership,

• promote student-teacher interaction with the teacher as facilitator,
• individualize learning and celebrate the uniqueness of each student,
• provide tangible evidence of a student's work,
• facilitate critical thinking, self-assessment, and revision processes,
• offer opportunities for collaborative work with peers, and
• permit assessment of multiple dimensions of language learning.

Now that you are aware of what a portfolio is and its benefits, we would like to include some
guidelines you should follow if you wish to integrate portfolios into your language classroom.

• State objectives clearly

 • Give guidelines on what materials to include
• Communicate assessment criteria to students
• Designate time within the curriculum for portfolio development.
• Establish periodic schedules for review and conferencing.
• Designate an accessible place to keep portfolios.
• Provide positive washback when giving final assessments.

Stop and think: Have you used portfolios before? Did it work? In case that
you haven´t used portfolios: why haven`t you used it?

We strongly suggest you consider the use of portfolios in your language classroom; you will be
surprised of how engaged your students can be and how beneficial it is for your teaching
practice.

b) Interviews
This term is intended to denote a context in which a teacher interviews a student for a designated
assessment purpose. (We are not talking about a student conducting an interview of others in order to
gathering formation on a topic.)

Interviews may have one or more of several possible goals, in which the teacher

• assesses the student's oral production,

• ascertains a student's needs before designing a course or curriculum,
• seeks to discover a student's learning styles and preferences,
• asks a student to assess his or her own performance, and
• requests an evaluation of a course.

Stop and think: to what extent are you in favor of the use of interviews in
your assessment? Have you used it in your assessment practices?

One overriding principle of effective interviewing centers on the nature of the questions that will
be asked. It is easy for teachers to assume that interviews are just informal conversations and that
they need little or no preparation.

To maintain the all-important reliability factor, interview questions should be constructed

carefully to elicit as focused a response as possible. When interviewing for oral production
assessment, for example, a highly specialized set of probes is necessary to accomplish
predetermined objectives.

Because interviews have multiple objectives, as noted above, it is difficult to generalize principles
for conducting them, but the following guidelines may help to frame the questions efficiently:

1) Offer an initial atmosphere of warmth and anxiety-lowering (warm-up).

2) Begin with relatively simple questions.
3) Continue with level-check and probe questions but adapt to the interviewee as needed.
4) Frame questions simply and directly.
5) Focus on only one factor for each question. Do not combine several objectives in the same
question.
6) Be prepared to repeat or reframe questions that are not understood. Creating a script for
this step is suggested.
7) Wind down with friendly and reassuring dosing comments.

Stop and think: what was the last assessment you apply that could have
been changed to the use of interviews? Elaborate on it!

If you take the time to reflect on your assessment practices, you will be able to find space for
alternative assessment. It is not time to analyze observations.
c) Observations and checklists

All teachers, without being aware, are always observing students in their class constantly.

Observation is a systematic, planned procedure for real-time, almost furtive recording of student
verbal and nonverbal behavior. One of the objectives of such observation is to assess students
without their awareness (and possible consequent anxiety) of the observation so that the
naturalness of their linguistic performance is maximized.

Stop and think: what kinds of performance can be usually observed?

Perhaps, you wrote:

• Sentence-level oral production skills

o Pronunciation of target sounds, intonation, etc.
o Grammatical features (verb tenses, question formation, etc.)
• Discourse level skills (conversation rules, turn-taking, and other macro skills)
• Interaction with classmates (cooperation, frequency of oral production)
• Evidence of listening comprehension (questions, clarifications, etc.)

In order to conduct a successful observation and gather the evidence you need, we suggest you
follow these steps:
 1) Determine specific objective for the observation.

2) Decide how many students will be observed at one time.

3) Set up the logistics for making unnoticed observations.

4) Design a system for recording observed performances.

5) Do not overestimate the number of different elements you can observed at one time –

keep them every limited.

6) Plan how many observations you will make.

7) Determine specifically how you will use the results.

One way to ease your record keeping during an observation is with the use of checklists

The observer identifies an activity or episode and checks appropriate boxes along a grid. This grid
refers to variables such as whole-class, group, and individual participation, linguistic competence
(form, function, discourse, sociolinguistic), etc. Each variable has subcategories for better analysis.

It is important that you take the time to elaborate your checklist with specific details and that
you get familiar with the format, to eventually, during the observation, you have no problems in
understanding what boxes to tick.

d) Self – and peer-assessment

Let`s start this sub-section by asking you a question:

 Stop and think: How could learners who are still in the process of
acquisition, especially in the early processes, be capable of rending an
accurate assessment of their own performance?

Self-assessment derives its theoretical justification from a number of well-established principles

of second language acquisition. The principle of autonomy stands out of the primary foundation
stones of successful learning. The ability to set one´s own goals both within and beyond the
structure of a classroom, to pursue them without the presence of an external prod, and to
independently monitor that pursuit are all keys to success.

Then, we are giving students the opportunity to determine their own level of success in
performing a task; however, in order to do it effectively we must first understand the guidelines
for self- and peer-assessment.

Step 1) tell students the purpose of the assessment. Self-assessment is a process that many
students – specially those in traditional education systems – will initially find quite
unconformable.

Step 2) Define the task (s) clearly. Make sure the students know exactly what they are supposed
to assess and explain them the materials they will use (observation / checklist).
Step 3) Encourage impartial evaluation of performance or ability. One of the greatest
drawbacks of self-assessment is the threat to subjectivity. Make sure you show to students the
advantages of honest and objective opinions by doing it so, you can maximize the benefits of this
alternative assessment tool.
Step 4) Ensure beneficial washback through follow-up tasks. It is not enough to just complete
a checklist and then walk away. You can ask students to write a journal reflection, write feedback
to the teacher, etc.

Stop and think: Have you used self and peer assessment as part of your
current assessment practices?

If your answer is yes, let us congratulate you; however, if your answer is negative, it might be the
case that you consider this type of alternative assessment not reliable and maybe not valid as
students might not legitimately assess themselves. Our suggestion is for you to practice self and
peer assessment with a checklist and questionnaires and work on raising students´ awareness
on the process; once students accept the notion that then can assess themselves, validity will be
raised.
Now that you have analyzed some alternative assessment options is time to close this unit with
our summary and complete the assessment plan.
 6. Summary and Conclusions

In this unit, we introduced the concept of alternative assessment. More importantly, we

encouraged you to integrate it to your current assessment practices by mentioning the different
advantages it will bring to you and your students.

Moreover, we provided you with some examples of alternative assessment and we finally wrote
guidelines and suggestions on how to adopt them to ease your transition from traditional to
alternative assessment.

As Huerta-Macìas (1995) points out the main benefit of alternative assessment is that they are
non-intrusive in that they merely extend and reflect the day-to-day classroom curriculum. She
goes on to suggest that more importantly, students are therefore evaluated on what they
ordinarily do in class every day.

In fact, virtually all language tests have some degree of performance included. It might be more
appropriate to think of tests as more performance oriented or less performance oriented along
a continuum from least direct and least real-world or authentic to most direct and most real-
world or authentic.

Tests are neither good nor evil in and of themselves. They are simple tools. Teachers must look
with clear eyes at all of these tools as alternatives in assessments. They are by no means magical,
but they are alternatives that teachers should consider within an overall framework of
responsible assessment and decision making.
 7. Assessment Plan

Before we give you instructions, we invite you to reflect to what extent the end of
unit tasks in all your BA Courses are considered traditional assessment.

Remember, this task should be uploaded to UAS Platform through the assignment
icon before Sunday at 10:00pm

Instructions:

Step 1) Analyze a class that you recently taught or a traditional assessment that you
have already applied / used. Example, the last quiz, exam, etc.

Step 2) Transform that traditional assessment used in that class into an alternative
assessment. Make sure you use the most suitable replacement and that it is easy to
identify the differences from traditional to the alternative assessment type.

Step 3) Design the alternative assessment. (materials, instructions, etc.)

Step 4) Write a report answering the following questions:

• What are the main disadvantages of the traditional assessment method that
you used?
• What advantages do you foresee in introducing your alternative assessment
to that class that you already taught? How would have things been different
if you had used the alternative assessment in that given class?

Step 5) In a word document include:

 • A cover page
• A general description of the class taught (make sure you provide enough
information for me to judge the appropriacy of the alternative method used.
If this information is not well described enough you will lose marks.
• The sample traditional assessment highlighting the disadvantages.
• The alternative assessment designed including why it is better.
• A conclusion including the answers to the following questions (250 words)
o Your personal opinion of traditional vs alternative assessment.
o How can alternative assessment help you improve the quality of your
assessment?
o Anything that surprised you and helped you grow as a language
teacher.

Step 6) Submit in a PDF before Sunday at 10:00pm.

Your tutor,

Heidy Paredes
 Discussion FORUM.

Welcome to the discussion forum, this is an opportunity for all of us to exchange

ideas, challenge positions and enrich our learning by making it more meaningful
with our experiences.

Instructions:

Step 1) Answer the following questions:

• My personal opinion on what alternative assessment is. Make sure you clearly
state your position in favor or against its use in your language classroom.
• Say how this unit has helped you understanding your role assessing your
students.

Step 2) Post your answers in 250 words. Due date Tuesday.

Step 3) REPLY to your peers asking questions, clarifying information, challenging their
ideas, etc. Due date Thursday.

Step 4) Answer the replies you received. Due date Saturday.

Step 5) Come back on Monday to (1) read and (2) react to the summary of the
forum. Due date Monday.

Your tutor,

Heidy Paredes