Unit 4 OTHER ASSESSMENT CONSIDERATIONS AND TESTING

TECHNIQUES.

4.1 USING BAND SCALES TO LOWER SUBJECTIVITY

We need to have a system which assures some degree of reliability in our informal assessments
of student performance. This can be done through designing a Band Scale, which includes a
number of divisions, or bands, of possible student performance, and descriptors for each band.
In this way, we can choose which criteria students are going to be assessed on. For example, for
the speaking skill, we might decide to concentrate on fluency in our assessment, rather than
accuracy. Agreeing on a band scale and its associated descriptors with colleagues can give
greater reliability to our assessments.
Harris and McCann (1994) offer a very simple band scale for speaking:
5 -- student speaks fluently - almost no errors
4 -- student speaks quite fluently - some errors
3 -- student shows some difficulty in speaking - many errors
2 -- student shows difficulty in speaking - almost incomprehensible
1 -- student is unable to use language - incomprehensible

Scales are normally more complex than this, and fall into two types, holistic and analytic scales.
We will look at each of these in turn.

Holistic (or global) scales:

These give overall descriptions of ability. Students’ performance is matched to one of the bands.
For example:
Analytic scales:

These separate out aspects of language performance into individual scales, giving a profile of
performance. For example:

An issue here is the number of bands that a scale attempts to discriminate, since the more bands
the better in terms of discriminating between students, but the more bands that are used the more
difficult it is to make reliable descriptors of each band.
WEEK 06 - Material 1