Along this course, we have been talking about different ways, tools and strategies for assessing students in second language learning processes. We have also discussed important concepts such as Reliability, validity, practicality, washback among others that we are starting to implement in our practices.
Now, new concepts need to be considered according to the reading Choosing and Devising test tasks. It seems to be hard for me as a teacher to deal with the word devising, frankly speaking I would like to avoid devise test tasks, but when you have been teaching a course and at the end of it you have to apply an assigned test, sometimes it could be harder than devise one.
I had a bad experience regarding test tasks at the beginning of this year. I was teaching a level 1 group of learners and when the time for the final test arrived I administered an assigned test. The exam seemed to be appropriate for them but when they started to answer it, the problems showed up. The listening part was so complex for their level, besides the complexity of the content, we haven’t worked in the type of exercise that they had to develop. My students complained and although I knew they were right I couldn’t skip that part I just encouraged them to do it. I felt so bad because the majority of them failed the listening section and it wasn’t the purpose. While reading the text, I realized that the fault was in the instructional objectives and instructional activities,(concepts cited by the authors).
In the reading “Choosing and devising test tasks” the authors mentioned four important factors to take into account for choosing the tasks of a test.
ü Instructional objectives: The task will be focused on the same kind of language skills described in the objectives
ü Students’ level of proficiency: which task is more suitable for a beginner and which is more suitable for an advanced learner. In this part, we talk about open-ended and close-ended response tasks.
ü Instructional activities: the activities selected must be known for the students, if they are familiar with the kind of exercise they will have a good performance.
ü Testing resources: Resources for taking into account such as time for administering and scoring the test, contents and physical space.
Maybe we had a wide idea about these new concepts but, what about applying them in our tests? I found some useful questions that we can ask ourselves at the moment of choosing the objectives: Do the objectives include all important outcomes of the course? Are the objectives realistic in terms of the abilities of the students and the time available? (Linn & Miller 2004).
It is also important to have a clear idea about what type of learning outcome do we expect from our students. Is it about Knowledge, Thinking skills, Performance skills, Application?
Having set the objectives, activities, resources, level of proficiency and a clear outcome we will be ready for designing a test with the appropriate tasks.
Although it was a little bit late to realize what your fault in that test was, the nice part of this is that somehow we are still in the first part of our experience as teachers. We are in the time to prepare ourselves in how assessment should work in a classroom. A example of this is the contact we are having with different information and reading about assessment, our assessment class and the experiences with our classes. All these new concepts will be the important tools to be the designers of appropriate tests.
ResponderEliminarThanks for your comment Aura.
ResponderEliminarYou are completely right, the majority of information we are getting is new and as you said we are living the first part of our teaching experience. Many things for doing while walking in the educational path.