Assessing in ELT, seen it beyond the paper

Assessing has been truly considered as one of the most challenging part of teaching. It has been known that assessment for learning should be part of effective planning of teaching and learning. Assessing also must be seen by the teacher as a way to know his students and the most important as a tool to make desicions about his teaching method not only to gather data or worse to collect scores. The teacher at the moment of assessing has to consider a set of variables about students like: previous education experiences and culture. This one is very important here, because this one strongly defines the way students learn and also how they assimilate situations.

We do not know what really matters about teaching, if it is the students' learning or the score. At the moment of creating a test the teacher has first to think about what he is interested in; it means the test creator has to analyze what his test is focus on. On the other hand, teachers have to become aware about the importance of assessing. Assessing can be useful not only for students but also for teachers: students can fall in motivation to learn through assessing, seeing it from the point that this is the moment for them to show how much they have learned; and secondly teachers can evaluate the way or the method which they use to teach, it means they can measure the efectiveness of his methodology on students' learning, in other words it could be called "self-assessment"

To talk about how a teacher can improve his teaching we must not forget about students indeed, because they are the directly affected ones, so in order for the teacher to know if he is doing a good job. Nothing better than asking your students about your activities, your lessons, your tests, and all those which is related to the class development.

Testing Through Tests

Through years tests have been consolidating themseleves in education as one of the most useful ways to measure learners' knowledge, if it is not the most used one. How meaninful a test can be depends on many factors. First, establishing a purpose for the test before applying it; second, being aware of what has been taught in order to know what to assess; third, the different reflections the teacher can subtract from the test experience; and fourth, being exposed to possible changes on the way to assess the learners. The teacher must consider all these issues at the moment of applying a test, the old fashioned idea of seeing a test just as a tool to get a grade and classify the learners' knowledge must not be accepted nowadays.

Another aspect very important to mention is that the teacher must not forget telling his students about the objective of the test, as well as giving them the instructions very clear; if it is necesary the teacher must repeat them. The teacher must let students know that tests are the opportunity to show how much they have learned and also to know what topics need more attention and maybe explanation. A test must be seen by students as a challenge in order to learn, and the teacher is the person in charge of encouraging them to take tests in a good way, he is who motivates them to keep learning. On the other hand, the teacher must be concious that kids have different learning skills, it means the teacher have to know how to measure the knowledge of each student doing a balance between the different skills the students are assessed.  

-While large-scale standardized tests may appear to have great influence at specific times. Without question, teachers are the drivers of the assessment systems that determine the effectiveness of schools. 

Stiggins, 1994, p. 438

  

Before being a test there was a purpose

It is already known that tests are not the unique and the best way to assess students’ abilities. It is a misleading perception that some teachers have about measuring knowledge. There is another aspect as a matter of fact even worse, and it is the point that those kinds of teachers do not even take some time to design their “tests”. This issue is really worrying as tests have an impact on students’ learning motivation. It depends on the way how teachers design, apply and above all how they administer the results or in “real words” the grades. Let’s remember measuring achievement must be seen by students as a chance to show how much they have learned, or putting it clearer, tests must motivate students’ learning process.

In order to reach all that great and necessary impacts on students’ learning process teachers at the moment of designing tests have to establish a purpose, it means why such a test will be applied, the test has to have an object in. This is the complicated part in which most of teachers fail and they do just because they go directly to design the test but they forget the aim of assessing. There must be a connection between the test and real language test, it means that the test the teacher gives must connect with what is happening in class or with what could be useful in class. It is totally required that exists a cohesion between the test and the course. The student has to see how useful what is being evaluated in the test can be; and the starting point of this is the test design, it is the teacher’s responsibility. The educator in this way will be able to help students gain confidence at testing.

My point of view is that teachers have not to forget that there is always a purpose for everything and assessing is not the exception. Test must not be seen as the learning goal in the education process. And the key for this is the proper test design. To conclude assessment is of vital importance to both students and teachers. It tells instructors how many students have already achieved learning goals, who are the students struggling with their learning, and which activities or methods are more helpful than others.

There are many ways rather than just testing

Testing has been the most frequent and also the most traditional approach to measure achievement in education. There could be a large number of reasons why it has been happening knowingly that we are in a digital area where you can surf through the internet to look for a different alternative for your pedagogical model. I do not want to seem risky or say something premeditated against testing, but what I do feel very confident to say is that testing has reached its popularity thanks to its practicality, reliability, accuracy, etc. and that is what education needs in order to standardize, regulate, homogenize  information or “knowledge” to be taught. On the other hand, that approach as testing indeed is facilitates the teacher’s job, because measuring achievement by this approach is not time consuming and is easy to show evidences and that is in fact what parents want. According to this, testing has an advantage over the other methods for the reason that it is a formal procedure with time limitations, totally different to what assessing considers; because assessing refers to a much broader concept, to put it easier to understand while a teacher is teaching he could be also assessing at the same time.

Measuring achievement is a very controversial issue, because the good teacher has to consider on one side the different assessing methods an on the other side their students skills. The teacher must take into account a set of factors at the moment of building an appropriate assessing model. For example he has to focus on processes as well as products, he must also make his students perform, create, produce or do something related to the goals of the curriculum but in a suitable way. One more aspect to consider is that measuring achievement must be done to motivate students to learn or to show what they know. Putting it in other words, measuring achievement is an issue that ought to make teachers to think beyond testing and also to find the proper method to capture and analyze every single prove that can be used to show what students really know or how their processes are being developing.

To sum it up, testing is not the only way to measure students’ learning process. The teacher has to play a balance-game between practicality and reliability with washback and authenticity. Practicality and reliability that is what testing offers help the teacher to minimize time and money and on the other side to be “precise” with their students’ grades. But the teacher cannot ignore other methods to assess such as portfolios, journals, conferences and interviews, observations, etc.  Because as the teacher puts all those considerations to turn around inside a balance container I am pretty sure he will develop a set of tools to assess his students triangulating all the possible evidences.