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Assessment is more than setting tests. It involves gathering data on learner progress and achievement. It can include tests and exams, but there are many other forms, methods and styles of assessment. If used in the right way, assessment will improve your teaching.
There are different types of tests: diagnostic test, placement test, formative assessment, progress test, achievement or summative test, proficiency test, self-assessment or peer assessment.
Assessment can affect what we teach, how we teach and our learners' motivation for learning. It is very important for tests to have a positive influence on teaching and learning (rather than a scary, daunting or demotivating effect on learners).
Assessment tasks should accurately reflect what we are attempting to teach and what we expect our learners to be learning.
Feedback to learners on what they got right or wrong, their strengths and weaknesses and what they can do to improve, is very important. Through feedback, assessment helps learning. Informal assessment is often much more suitable for assessing young learners than formal assessment. This is because their ways of thinking and learning are based on experiencing and communicating.
Formal assessment —when a student's work is judged through a test and the student is given a report or a grade to say how successful or unsuccessful they have been.
Summative assessment —when a test is used at the end of a course where a mark or grade rather than feedback is given.
Informal assessment —when a teacher measures whether a student is doing well or not (but does not necessarily set a test or write an official report or give a grade). This can simply be the teacher monitoring a student's progress throughout the course.
Formative assessment —when a teacher gives students feedback on their progress during a course, rather than at the end of it, so that they can learn from the feedback and adjust their learning to focus more on their problem areas and weaknesses.
Portfolio assessment —A portfolio is a collection of work that a student uses to show what he/she has done during a particular course. It could be a folder containing all of the student's written work over a course. These concrete examples of work can be used at various stages in a course to measure or assess student progress.
Continuous assessment —a type of testing which is different from a final examination. Some or all of the work that students do during a course is checked by the teacher on a regular basis and is used to calculate the final grade given to students. It may also include monitoring of classroom performance and participation (not just scores or grades for tasks).
Peer assessment —when students give feedback on their classmates' language, classroom tasks, homework, learning strategies and performance etc.
accuracy 准确性
achievement test 成绩测试
appropriacy 恰当性
assessment 评估
autonomous 自主的
cloze test 完形填空
continuous assessment 持续性评估
diagnostic test 诊断测试
feedback 反馈
fluency 流畅性
formal assessment 正式评估
formative assessment 形成性评估
informal assessment 非正式评估
interaction 互动
matching task 匹配任务
multiple-choice questions 选择题
objective test 客观题
open comprehension questions 开放式问题
oral test 口头测试
peer assessment 同伴评估
placement test 分班测试
When we talk about assessment, many terms overlap.
Don't get confused by formative and formal assessments though they two sound and look similar. Formative assessment can be a type of formal assessment , and the easy way to remember what this means is to compare formative assessment with summative assessment:
formative assessment: usually done during a course, and will form the basis of future teaching(after finding weaknesses);
summative assessment: usually done at the end of a course, and can be used to test the sum of everything learned on the course.
This is where students assess each other (peer) and themselves (self), and can encourage students to take greater responsibility for their learning.
Assessment (either summative or formative) is often categorised as either objective or subjective. Objective test usually has a single correct answer. (e.g. grammar practice exercises ) Subjective test may have more than one correct answer or more than one way of expressing the correct answer. (e.g. writing a story / a speaking interview )
A diagnosis is a judgement about what a particular illness or problem is, and is made after the problem is examined. A doctor makes diagnosis after examining a patient; an IT engineer might diagnose a problem with a computer system.
A diagnostic test is a test that helps the teacher and learners identify specific problems that they currently have. For example, at the start of the course, the teacher could give the learners a diagnostic test to see what areas of vocabulary need to be covered during the course. The aim of the test would be to identify what words the learners don't know, that is, to diagnose their vocabulary problems. Formative assessments given during the course can also act as diagnostic tests as they help the teacher and learners decide what things will be taught in the remaining lessons of that course.
You probably have already used some kind of summative formal assessment at the end of your course to measure student progress. If you are teaching students on a longer course, for example, if you are a primary school teacher, you are probably already using continuous assessment. If, on the other hand, you are teaching a short course, you will have fewer lessons with your students and in this situation, especially with larger classes, continuous assessment is difficult for teachers.
Before you teach your next class: Think about giving students the chance to do some peer assessment. Peer assessment works best when students are using some form of marking criteria or scoring framework. Usually, a teacher will design the criteria, but students could design the marking criteria themselves to make the lesson more interesting.
While you're teaching your next class: Look out for opportunities where you might be able to use some self-assessment. You could have students rate their own performance on a particular task or for the lesson as a whole. Getting students to independently assess their own and other students' progress rather than always relying on the teacher helps create independent and autonomous learners.
After your next class: Reflect on whether you assessed how much your students have actually learned in that lesson. If you did, what type of assessment did you use? If you didn't, do you think the lesson could be improved by including some kind of assessment to measure learning?
TKT questions might ask you to:
» Match assessment tasks with instructions for that task.
» Match assessment aims or areas of assessment with assessment tasks.
» Complete a sentence about assessment.
Look at the areas for assessment and the three possible assessment tasks listed A, B and C. Two of the tasks assess the area. One task does NOT. Choose the task (A, B or C) which does NOT assess the area.
1. To assess listening skills
A. choosing the best title for the recording
B. deciding whether statements about a text are correct or incorrect
C. finding the meaning of a word in the dictionary
2. To assess collocations
A. matching the adjectives in one column with the nouns in another column
B. doing the true/false questions deciding whether two words frequently go with each other
C. matching words which have similar sounds in them
3. To assess grammatical accuracy
A. doing gap-fill exercises
B. doing choral drill exercises
C. re-ordering jumbled sentences
4. To assess lexical sets
A. filling in the missing words in a sentence
B. categorising words into different columns
C. crossing out the odd one in each group
5. To assess pronunciation
A. marking the intonation patterns on written sentences
B. listening and repeating words, and finding the odd one out in terms of stress
C. a dictation of a familiar fairy story
Key: 1. C 2. C 3. B 4. A 5. C
When a teacher teaches, no matter how well he or she might design a lesson, what a child learns is unpredictable. Children do not always learn what we teach. That is why the most important assessment does not happen at the end of learning—it happens during the learning, when there is still time to do something with the information.
— Dylan William
The more you teach without finding out who understands the concepts and who doesn't, the greater the likelihood that only already-proficient students will succeed.
— Grant Wiggins
Quick Read: Learning Teaching (3rd Ed. Chapter 12 on Testing) — Jim Scrivener
Longer Read: Testing for Language Teachers — Arthur Hughes
Embedded Formative Assessment — Dylan William