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მე-4 საერთაშორისო სამეცნიერო კონფერენცია "ენა და კულტურა", 2017

ATINA TOIDZE

ASSESSMENT OF LEARNING

ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE STUDENTS

Meaning and the role of assessment in teaching English.

Assessment may be defined as “any method used to better understand the current knowledge that a student possesses.” This implies that assessment can be as simple as a teacher's subjective judgement based on a single observation of student performance, or as complex as a five-hour standardized test. In classrooms where assessment for learning is practiced, students are encouraged to be more active in their learning and associated assessment. The ultimate purpose of assessment for learning is to create self-regulated learners who can leave school able and confident to continue learning throughout their lives. The idea of current knowledge implies that what a student knows is always changing and that we can make judgements about student achievement through comparisons over a period of time. Assessment may affect decisions about grades, advancement, placement, instructional needs, and curriculum.

Assessment is the process of gathering information about a student in order to make decisions about this or her education. One kind of assessment procedure is testing. In elementary and secondary schools, tests are given routinely to measure the extent to which we profit from instruction. We may have taken intelligence, aptitude, interest, personality tests or any number of other kinds of tests. Testing means presenting a person with a set of questions or tasks in order to obtain a measure of performance often represented by a score. The score is intended to help answer questions and produce information about the person tested. Increasingly, educators are finding new ways to evaluate students' school performances using informal rather than formal, or standardized, assessment procedures. Collection of information by means of observation is often thought of as informal assessment, as is information gathered from interviews with parents or past teachers and by using teacher-constructed tests.

                                   

Since the influence of testing on curriculum and instruction is now widely acknowledged, educators, policymakers, and others are turning to alternative assessment methods as a tool for educational reform. The movement away from traditional, multiple-choice tests to alternative assessments - variously called authentic assessment or performance assessment - has included a wide variety of strategies such as open-ended questions, exhibits, demonstrations, hands-on execution of experiments, computer simulations, writing in many disciplines, and portfolios of student work over time. These terms and assessment strategies have led the quest for more meaningful assessments which better capture the significant outcomes we want students to achieve and better match the kinds of tasks which they will need to accomplish in order to assure their future success. Teachers as decision makers strive to make a close match between curriculum objectives, instructional methods, and assessment techniques. The evaluation process carried out parallel to instruction is a cyclical one that involves four phases: preparation, assessment, evaluation, and reflection.

In the preparation phase, teachers decide what is to be evaluated, the type of evaluation to be used (diagnostic, formative, or summative), the criteria upon which student learning outcomes will be judged, and the most appropriate assessment techniques for gathering information on student progress. Teachers may make these decisions in collaboration with students. During the assessment phase, teachers select appropriate tools and techniques, then collect and collate information on student progress. Teachers must determine where, when, and how assessments will be conducted, and students must be consulted and informed. During the evaluation phase, teachers interpret the assessment information and make judgements about student progress. These judgements (or evaluation) provide information upon which teachers base decisions about student learning and report progress to students and parents/guardians. Students are encouraged to monitor their own learning by evaluating their achievements on a regular basis. Encouraging students to participate in evaluation nurtures gradual acceptance of responsibility for their own progress and helps them understand and appreciate their growth.

The reflection phase allows teachers to consider the extent to which the previous phases in the evaluation process have been successful. Specifically, teachers evaluate the utility, equity, and appropriateness of the assessment techniques used. Such reflection assists teachers in making decisions concerning improvements or adaptations to subsequent instruction and evaluation.

Good assessment is vital.

Good assessment information provides accurate estimates of student performance and enables teachers or other decision makers to make appropriate decisions. The concept of test validity captures these essential characteristics and the extent that an assessment actually measures what it is intended to measure, and permits appropriate generalizations about students' skills and abilities. For example, a ten-item addition/subtraction test might be administered to a student who answers nine items correctly. If the test is valid, we can safely generalize that the student will likely do as well on similar items not included on the test. The results of a good test or assessment, in short, represent something beyond how students perform on a certain task or a particular set of items; they represent how a student performs on the objective which those items were intended to assess.

Measurement experts agree that test validity is tied to the purposes for which an assessment is used. Thus, a test might be valid for one purpose but inappropriate for other purposes. For example, our mathematics test might be appropriate for assessing students' mastery of addition and subtraction facts but inappropriate for identifying students who are gifted in mathematics. Evidence of validity needs to be gathered for each purpose for which an assessment is used.

A second important characteristic of good assessment information is its consistency, or reliability. Will the assessment results for this person or class be similar if they are gathered at some other time or under different circumstances or if they are scored by different raters? For example, if you ask someone what his/her age is on three separate occasions and in three different locations and the answer is the same each time, then that information is considered reliable. In the context of performance-based and open-ended assessment, inter-rater reliability also is essential; it requires that independent raters give the same scores to a given student response.

Other characteristics of good assessment for classroom purposes:

- The content of the tests (the knowledge and skills assessed) should match the teacher's educational objectives and instructional emphasis.

- The test items should represent the full range of knowledge and skills that are the primary targets of instruction.

- Expectations for student performance should be clear.

- The assessment should be free of extraneous factors which unnecessarily confuse student responses. (For example, unclear directions and contorted questions may confuse a student and confound his/her ability to demonstrate the skills which are intended for assessment.

Testing.

Testing each skill is uniquely difficult, but testing writing presents two particular problems. The first is making decisions about the matter of control, objectivity of the evaluation, and naturalness in the writing test. If you decide to test writing in a controlled way and in a way that can be graded objectively, you must do so in a way that does not necessarily reflect how the writing is used by the students in the real world. If, on the other hand, you test writing in a way that would reflect how the students use writing in the real world, it is difficult to have control over the writing and to evaluate the student's work objectively. The second major problem with testing writing is, if the test is done in a way that it cannot be graded objectively, it is necessary to develop a scale that allows it to be graded as objectively as possible. How this is done is one of the great difficulties of testing writing.

Writing should cover the next:

• grammatical ability. This is the ability to write English in grammatically correct sentences.

• lexical ability. The ability to choose words that are correct and used appropriately.

• mechanical ability. The ability to correctly use punctuation, spelling, capitalization, etc.

• stylistic skills. The ability to use sentences and paragraphs appropriately.

• organizational skills. The ability to organize written work according to the conventions of English, including the order and selection of material.

• judgements of adequacy. The ability to make judgements about what is appropriate depending on the task, the purpose of the writing, and the audience. Perhaps the most difficult—and most important—of these skills is the last. Native English speakers develop a sense of what is appropriate in different writing situations (though they may be taught to use specialized registers, such as academic English or business English). Registers of English range from very informal forms such as colloquialisms, slang, and jargon to standard English to more formal forms, such as the language used for business letters, legal documents, and academic papers. Writers must be aware of these differences and learn to follow the conventions of different situations. A writing test needs to take these skills into account.

Some Types of writing tasks.

- Gap filling. One of the most controlled ways of testing writing is gap filling. Testees are presented with a passage with blanks, and they fill in the blanks. This is a mixture of both reading and writing skills, which is sometimes a problem, because it makes it difficult to decide what the scores really mean. However, with lower level students, it might be the only reasonable test of productive ability.

- Form completion. Another controlled way of testing writing is to have the testees fill out a form, for example, an application. The advantage of such a task is that it is at least somewhat communicative, but the disadvantage is that it does not require any connected discourse or any use of language greater than lexical knowledge and a small amount of grammar.

- Making corrections. In some situations, testees are presented with a short piece of writing which has deliberate grammar, punctuation and spelling errors, and they are asked to correct the errors. While this task does something which is related to one thing that people do when they write—editing—and it is objectively corrected, but it does not represent the writing task as a whole.

- Letter writing. Letter writing is a common task for writing tests. The stimulus for the letter may be a situation that is explained in the instructions, a letter to which the testees are instructed to respond, information given in chart or graph form that is to be summarized in the testees' letter, pictures or drawings that give information about a situation the testees are expected to write a letter about, etc. In all of these possibilities, the tester must keep in mind that the situation must be as clear as possible for the testee, unless there is an intention to test reading and writing together. If the testee does not understand, for example, a letter that he/she is expected to respond to, it will be impossible to get a sample of writing to evaluate.

- Essay writing. Essay writing is probably one of the more common writing tasks, but it should be used carefully. If the future situation of the students will not include writing essays, the tester should carefully consider whether it is the best test of the students' writing ability.

Motivation. The tester should consider the issue of motivation. Will the topic motivate students of the age, sex, field of study, background, etc., of the testees to write? It is often difficult to find a topic that will motivate all students equally. Some testers choose the strategy of choosing a subject that none of the students are likely to be motivated by. If none of the students is motivated, they will at least be on equal footing. The problem with this approach is that it may be difficult for students to do their best at showing their writing skill if they are not motivated by the topic.

Breadth. The topic needs to be broad enough that every testee can approach it from some angle. If the topic is too narrow, the testees have little flexibility in their approach to it and may not have an opportunity to show their writing proficiency. Allowing students to choose topics. In some cases, students are allowed to choose from a list of topics. This raises difficulties in the reliability of the grading, so unless skill in choosing a topic is an ability being tested, this is not recommended.

For better explanation see the chart 1.

Chart 1

TYPES OF ASSESSMENT
Selected Response	Constructed Response	Performance Assessment	Informal Assessment
Multiple Choice	Fill-in-the-Blank (words, phrases)	Presentation	Oral Questioning
True-False	Essay	Movement	Observation
Matching	Short Answer (sentences, paragraph)	Science Lab	Interview
	Diagram	Project	Conference
	Web	Debate	Process Description
	Table	Model	Checklist
	Illustration	Exhibition	Rating Scale
			Journal Sharing
			Student Self Assessment
			Peer Review

Choice of task(s).

Connected discourse. The task should require testees to write a piece of connected discourse. While there may be valid arguments for testing the writing of beginning students by having them just fill in blanks, once students are beyond the beginning stage, their writing proficiency should not be tested by having them translate from their native language or fill in blanks.

Realistic task. The task that is chosen should reflect the type of writing that the testee is required to do in the real world. If the test is for students who will be going to English-medium universities, an appropriate task would be having students write an essay on an academic topic. Tasks which the testee would not usually perform in English would not be appropriate.

Clarity. The testees should be presented with a clearly defined task that cannot easily be misinterpreted. Pre-testing helps insure that the instructions are clear and that the testees can carry out the task based on them. Modes of discourse. The test tasks should involve a mode or modes of discourse that are appropriate to the actual writing needs of the students. If necessary, the testees should be given more than one task so that they can demonstrate their mastery of different modes of discourse. In fact, a recent trend is to evaluate students, where possible, on different types of material that they have produced over a long period of time, rather than over one piece of writing on a particular occasion.

 The number of tasks. The test should involve more than one task, which will give an adequate sample of the testees' writing for evaluation. As mentioned above, different types of writing will also give a broader view of the students' writing skills.

Level of difficulty. The teacher should carefully consider the difficulty of the test. Like any other test, if a writing test presents a task that is too easy or too difficult, if the instructions are difficult to understand, etc., the responses that testees give will not reflect their true ability, either because the task is not challenging enough for their ability or because it is so difficult that they do not know how to respond. Pre-testing with a similar group is useful in determining the right level of difficulty.

Time allowed. The teacher should carefully consider the time allowed for the test. If insufficient time is allowed, the students do not have a chance to show what they can do, particularly on a test where the organization of a piece of writing is assessed. However, there may be cases, such as writing an essay for an examination, where the task that the student needs to be able to do in the real world will have restrictions on time, so in some cases, it is appropriate to limit the time allowed.

 რეზიუმე: სტუდენტის შეფასების მიზანია სწავლა-სწავლების ხარისხის მართვა, რაც გულისხმობს სწავლის ხარისხის გაუმჯობესებაზე ზრუნვასა და კონტროლს. სქავლების თანამედროვე მიდგომები ითვალისწინებს, რომ მოსწავლე (სტუდენტი) შეფასდეს სხვადასხვა ფორმებით (ესსე, პროექტის მომზადება, ზეპირი გამოსვლა, წარმოდგენა, წერითი, ფერწერული ან სხვა ტიპის ნამუშევარი, არგუმენტირებული მსჯელობა და სხვა). მოსწავლემ წინასწარ უნდა იცოდეს, რა კრიტერიუმებით ფასდება მისი სასწავლო აქტივობა.

Resume:

Assessment is at the heart of education: Teachers and parents use test scores to gauge a student's academic strengths and weaknesses, communities rely on these scores to judge the quality of their educational system use these same metrics to determine whether public schools are up to scratch.

In modern classrooms where assessment for learning is practiced, students are encouraged to be more active in their learning and associated assessment. The ultimate purpose of assessment for learning is to create self-regulated learners who can leave university (school) able and confident to continue learning throughout their lives.

The demands of the today's world require students learn many skills. A knowledge-based, highly technological economy requires that students master higher-order thinking skills and that they are able to see the relationships among seemingly diverse concepts. These abilities -- recall, analysis, comparison, inference, and evaluation -- will be the skills of a literate twenty-first-century citizen. And they are the kinds of skills that aren't measured by our current high-stakes tests.
In addition, skills such as teamwork, collaboration, and moral character -- traits that aren't measured in a typical standardized tests -- are increasingly important. Businesses are always looking for employees with people skills and the ability to get along well with coworkers.

Bibliography:

Airasian, P. W. Classroom Assessment. - New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991.

Daves, C.W. (Ed.). The Uses and Misuses of Tests. - San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass, 1984.

Ebel, R. L., & Frisbie, D. A. Essentials of Educational Measurement. - Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1991.

Hean Hosterman, E. Ed. Special Education Tests: A Handbook for Parents and Professionals. - Minneapolis, Minnesota, PACER Center, Inc, 1989.

Popham, W.J. Modern Educational Measurement. - Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1981.

Tierney, R.J., Carter, M.A., & Desai, L.E. Portfolio Assessment in the Reading-Writing Classroom. - Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon Publishers, 1991.

Wells, J. C. Accents of English. - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Wittrock, M. C., & Baker, E. L. (Eds.). Testing and Cognition. – Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991.

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