It is about the learning or the score?

WHAT DO YOU THINK, HUH? 

What are you interested in? At the time of assess your students, what is more important?

This is one of the most conrtoversial questions a teacher could be asked to answer. Most of the teachers claim that every student is important, equal and taken as all  the others in the group. But I have felt the difference between those teachers who really care about our learning process, knowledge, opinions, points of view, etc: and the others who just focus on a score and a face. 

What kind of teachers are we? Can we forget about the subjectivity and just be objective? Or can we make a balance between both?

 Assessment affects decisions about grades, placement, advancement, instructional needs, curriculum, and, in some cases, funding. Assessment inspires us to ask these hard questions: "Are we teaching what we think we are teaching?" "Are students learning what they are supposed to be learning?" "Is there a way to teach the subject better, thereby promoting better learning?”

Sometimes we think we are using the right methodology and don't think about students learning, we don't make questions, like: Are they learning? Am I doing it right? What else do they need to comprehend what I want them to learn?

FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT

I wanted to write my conception about Formative Assessment, its uses and the benefits for students and teachers when using it in their classrooms. First of all, you are going to find some theories that show what Formative Assessments is, then I wrote my own concept taking some of those beliefes and finally I talk about our reality in the classrooms. 
Have a look at it, and enjoy it giving your opinions and comments. 

FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT

According to Brown (2000) Assessment is an ongoing process aimed at understanding and improving student learning. It involves making our expectations explicit and public; setting appropriate criteria and high standards for learning quality; systematically gathering, analyzing, and interpreting evidence to determine how well performance matches those expectations and standards, using the resulting information to document, explain, and improve performance. 
Assessment for Learning focuses on the opportunities to develop students' ability to evaluate them, to make judgments about their own performance and improve upon it. It makes use of authentic assessment methods and offers lots of opportunities for students to develop their skills.
Black and William (1998) defined formative assessment as “all those activities undertaken by teachers, and/or by their students, which provide information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged” (p.10). 
According to Brown (2000) “formative assessment is evaluating students in the process of ‘forming’ their competencies and skills with the goal of helping them to continue that growth process.”

But, what Formative Assessment is for me? 
 According to all those theories and the knowledge we have acquired during the Assessment course, I can make my own concept for Formative Assessment:  It is one of the ways of evluating students in the classroom but focused not only on what students can produce in a paper; like tests, quices and answer questions, but on the informal process used by teachers and students to recognise and respond to student learning in order to help estudents to identify their weaknesses and strenghts to enhance that learning. Formative assessment also provides useful tools during the learning process in order to modify teaching and learning activities to improve student attainment.

Having stated what Formative Assessment is, I dare to say that in our real educational context, few teachers use formative assessment as their way to assess students. What would be the reasons for avoiding it? What makes Formative Assessment so complicated to use it in the classroom?

Let's see some examples in a real context.

When there is lack of Formative Assessment in the classroom: 

• Most of the time, the teacher does not provide accurate feedback what discourage students to continue with their learning process.
• Students need extra guidance during the development of the activities because they feel lost, since there are no clear instructions and purposes.
• Teacher just gives instructions but doesn't follow students proccess. 
• Students don't receive feedback, they just hear the teacher telling them what to do, what not to do and some corrections

When Formative Assessment is used in the classroom:

• Teacher give clear instructions and purposes to develop the activities, what make students to feel confident about what they are doing. 
• Teacher doesn't just give instructions, but guides the whole process of the activities that are being done;  giving suggestions, answering questions and solving doubts.
• Teacher tries to have students perform more activities where they can realize how to use certain topics they've learned in a real context; rather than having them memorize and translate structures. Thus, students would get more motivated and involved with the tasks, since they would feel more active in their process.
• Teacher motivates students to learn and take responsibility for their own learning; so that, they can become users of assessment alongside the teacher.
• After correcting the mistakes, teacher gives a strategy in order to avoid making them, and provides more examples so students understand how to use it well, instead of just repeating the rules.                      

Having given some examples of Formative Assessment in the classroom, I need to highlight the importance of feedback during this proccess.  

According to Brokhart (1997) the teaching and learning process requires continuous evaluation, which is suggested to take into account the purposes of formative assessment, understood as an evaluation focused on the effective and continuous feedback from the teacher, in which the teacher gets information for the purpose of generating greater interest and motivation in students to learn. 

is used to enhance learning (McMillan, 2007).

 Therefore it is important that every teacher looks for the best way to give feedback to their students helping them to realize the aspects they have to work most on when developing the activities. It also keeps them motivated to have a stretched relationship with the teacher so that there is no fear to be corrected.

I can finally say that it is important that students receive developmental feedback on all possible occasions, because it helps to internalize their learning process in a better way in which they make aware of their strengths and weaknesses.

References

Brown, H.D. (2000). Principles of language learning and teaching. (4ed.). New York: Pearson ESL

Black, P. y Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Phi Delta Kappan, 80 (2), 139-148.

McMillan, J. H. (2001). Classroom assessment: Principles and practice for effective instruction (2a ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

TESTS DESIGNING

DESIGNING CLASROOM LANGUAGE TESTS

After all the readings we’ve done and all the information we’ve got about tests, formal and informal tests, formative and summative tests; and having put tests where they belong in the larger domain of assessment. Now we are called to start a process of designing them properly.

To start that process we need to have some concepts clear like: practicability, authenticity, reliability,    validity and washback in order to apply them and measure the effectiveness of a classroom test. In addition to that, we also have to ask some critical questions:

·       What is the purpose of the test? Here we have to set the reason why we are creating a test, what are the things we want to measure and evaluate with it. Having the purpose clear we can determine its objectives.

·       What are the objectives of the test? We need to know what are the language skills that we want to assess and what information we want to find out with the test.

·       How will the test specifications reflect both, the purpose and the objectives?

·       How will the test tasks be selected and the separate items arranged?  The tasks should have the principles of practicality and validity in the way of reaching the other principles when providing results by the teacher evaluation. 

·       What kind of scoring, grading or feedback is expected? Results are different for every test, they depends on the purpose.

                                                                                                    

Having clear all those questions and establishing the purpose and the objectives in the right way, we are giving the first steps we have to follow to start the whole design test process.  As Brown says:

 ‘‘The five questions should form the basis of your approach to designing for your classroom’’                                                                                                                                                              Have them in mind and take them to the practice.

This information is taken from :

Brown, D. (2004) Language Assessment Principles and Practices. New York. Pearson Longman

Chapter 3, Designing Classroom Language Tests.

Hesitating about using journals?

JOURNALS

Having known that tests are not the only way for assessing, we keep talking about alternatives in assessment.  One of those is journals, thus I want to mention some important aspects about it. 

To start from the very beginning, we need to know that: 

A journal is: 

''A log of one’s thought, feelings, reactions, assessments, ideas, or progress, toward goals, usually written with little attention to structure, form, or correctness''

                 (Brown, D. (2004) Language Assessment Principles and Practices. New York. Pearson Longman)

Having clear the concept of journal, we need to be aware that we have to follow some steps if we want to use journals in our class. 

Those steps are: 

1. Sensitively introduce students to the concept of journal writing.

             2. State the objective(s) of the journal.

             3. Give guidelines on what kinds of topics to include. 

             4. Carefully specify the criteria for assessing or grading journals.

             5. Provide optimal feedback in your responses.

             Following those steps properly, we can make sure that we will obtain good results using a journal.  So, if we go through this process,  there are some basic things we would like to achieve:

             For teachers:

             - It will provide us important information about areas of difficulty. 

            - It will help us to identify students who are having similar problems in order to adjust their plans regarding students’ needs.

            - It will be helpful to us  in establishing the pace of instruction during problem-based learning.

              For students:  

             - It will allow students to express their opinions and comments freely.

             -  Journals will help students to see how far they've come over the course of the project.

            - It will allow students to reflect and evaluate their own progress, using chronological data written by themselves.  

            -  It will help them to self-assess their learning and their learning process.

             To sum up, I bet that if you read the information posted here, you are now thinking about implementing journals in your classes. To that, all I have to say is: Go ahead, forget about the ''easiest'' assessing tools and take the risk of getting though a new path using an effective, functional and rewarding tool. 

PORTFOLIOS AND BLOGS!

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PORTFOLIOS AND BLOGS

Taking into account what a portfolio is, and according to the guidelines proposed by Geneese & Upshur to have one; it can be said that to follow a blog like we are doing in assessment class, is a similar exercise to have a portfolio interactively.

 For example, our blog follows some steps mentioned in the portfolio guidelines:

• Students are told exactly what to do, and they know from the beginning how the work will be assessed.
• This exercise encourages students to review and share the blog with others. 
• It allows to always adopt a positive, collaborative and supportive attitude, especially when making comments.     On

Besides that, there are more positive comments about our blog, made by our classmates:

•    It helps us to work with critical thinking.
•    It makes us to be more organized and disciplined, due to we have some deadlines.
•    It helps us to improve our writing skills.
•    It permits that students write their opinions and make comments freely.
•    It also allows students and the teacher to talk about things (related to the topics studied) that couldn't be mentioned in class.

On the other hand, there are some others things to improve, like:

•   To plan blog conferences periodically that allow students to review their work with their teacher.
•   To discuss some posts from the blogs in class, so it can be had a deeper control of the process.

In conclusion, it is necessary to know the importance of following a blog and having a portfolio in our classes. Discussions and conferences can be done to look for strategies to improve this exercise, which in an early future will be part of our lives as teachers. 

SUMMING UP PORTFOLIOS!

PORTFOLIOS

Here I summed up the information about Portfolios found in:  
Brown, D. (2004) Language Assessment Principles and Practices. New York. Pearson Longman

In these four boxes, there is the information which I consider most interesting. 
Have a look to the images ;)

WHY IS IT SO DIFFICULT TO EXPRESS WHAT YOU HAVE IN MIND?