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.