Assessment of Student’s

Learning

Bernard Nino Q. Membrebe

Associate Professor
Is testing a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ thing?
• Educators (and not only) are divided into
two camps: the teachers and the testers
who meet in battle.
• Teachers often say things like:
– Let's learn to teach before we learn to
test.
– We deal with people, you deal with
statistics.
Is testing a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ thing?
• Testers think that teachers:
– tend to be unspecific about their aims
and objectives.
– Are disinterested in finding out whether
goals and objectives have been met.
 Can we do without teaching or
testing?
• Probably yes because:
– learning can occur in spite of teaching
and/or testing, despite any kind of
formal evaluation.
– The outcomes of teaching can be
assessed without any form of testing.
– Testing may be used to measure what
people already know.
 Is testing synonymous with the
terms below?
• Evaluation:
– Evaluation may focus on the effectiveness or
impact of a program of instruction,
examination or project. Students are usually
not asked to evaluate while teachers carry out
or take part in evaluation only in some
contexts. ‘Experts’ or the authorities are most
commonly legitimized to carry out formal
evaluation.
 Is testing synonymous with the
terms below?
• Measurement:
– Measurement is the process of determining
the amount or length of something when
compared with a fixed unit (e.g. using a ruler
to measure length). In language teaching
measurement constitutes the quantification of
language proficiency. Aspects of language
knowledge, specific abilities and skills are
measurable when there are transparent
criteria and precise analysis of data.
 Is assessment synonymous with
testing?
• No, it is not.
• Assessment is a more encompassing term
than testing.
• It is the process of gathering, interpreting,
and sometimes recording and using
information about students' responses to
an educational task in order to provide the
next learning step.
 Is assessment synonymous with
testing?
• Assessment is primarily concerned with
providing teachers and/or students with
feedback information.
• In language teaching, it is a local or global
procedure though which one can appraise
one or more aspects of language proficiency.
• Assessment is transparent when clear
assessment criteria have been
predetermined.
 Is there one form of
assessment?
There are different forms of assessment,
including:
•Formative assessment.
•Summative assessment.
•Self-assessment.
•Peer assessment.
 The most common forms of
assessment? (1/3)
• Continuous assessment refers to the
activities required by students during the
conduct of a course. It takes place within
the normal teaching period and contributes
to the final assessment.
 The most common forms of
assessment? (2/3)
• Formative assessment refers to observations
which allow one to determine the degree to
which students know or are able to perform a
given task. It involves all those activities
(assigned by teachers and performed by
students) which provide information used as
feedback so that teaching may meet students’
needs. It can also include teacher
assessment, feedback and feed-forward.
 The most common forms of
assessment? (3/3)
• Summative assessment is usually
carried out at the conclusion of a unit or
units of instruction, activity or plan, in order
to assess acquired knowledge and skills at
that particular point in time. It usually
serves the purpose of giving a grade or
making a judgment about the students’
achievements in the course.
 Other forms of assessment?
(1/2)
Less frequent but increasingly important forms are:
•Self-assessment occurs when an appraisal
instrument is self-administered for the specific purpose
of providing performance feedback, diagnosis and
prescription recommendations rather than a pass/fail
decision. Students engage in a systematic review of
their progress and achievement, usually for the
purpose of improvement. It may involve comparison
with an exemplar, success criteria, or other criteria. It
may also involve critiquing one's own work or a
description of the achievement obtained.
 Other forms of assessment?
(2/2)
• Peer assessment occurs when students judge
one another's work on the basis of reference
criteria. This can occur using a range of
strategies. The peer assessment process needs
to be taught and students need to be supported
by opportunities to practice it regularly in a
supportive and safe (classroom) environment.
 Does assessment include
testing?
• Yes, it does.
• Testing is a particular kind of assessment
which focuses on eliciting a specific
sample of performance. The implication of
this is that in designing a test we construct
specific tasks that will elicit performance
from which we can make the inferences
we want to make about the characteristics
of students, groups or individuals.
 How do we test?
There are different sorts of testing, including:
•Achievement testing.
•Communicative testing.
•Competence testing.
•Diagnostic testing.
•Integrative testing.
•Performance testing.
•Progress testing.
•Proficiency testing.
•Psychometric testing.
 Which kind of testing is the most
common? (1/2)
• Achievement testing. It is used to determine
whether or not students have mastered the course
content and how they should proceed. The content
of achievement tests, which are commonly given at
the end of the course, is generally based on the
course syllabus or the course textbook.
• Progress testing. It is used at various stages
throughout a language course to determine
learners’ progress up to that point and to see what
they have learnt.
 Which kind of testing is the most
common? (2/2)
• Proficiency testing. It is used to measure learners’
general linguistic knowledge, abilities or skills without
reference to any specific course.
– Some proficiency tests are intended to show
whether students or people outside the formal
educational system have reached a given level of
general language ability.
– Others are designed to show whether candidates
have sufficient ability to be able to use a language in
some specific area such as medicine, tourism etc.
Such tests are often called Specific Purposes tests.
 Which kind of testing is the least
common? (1/2)
• Diagnostic testing, which seeks to
identify those areas in which a student
needs further help. These tests can be
fairly general, and show, for example,
whether a student needs particular help
with one of the four language skills; or they
can be more specific, seeking to identify
weaknesses in a student’s use of
grammar.
 Which kind of testing is the least
common? (2/2)
• Psychometric testing, which is aimed at
measuring psychological traits such as
personality, intelligence, aptitude, ability,
knowledge, skills which makes specific
assumptions about the nature of the ability
tested (e.g. that it is unidimensional and
normally distributed). It includes a lot of
discrete point items.
 What do tests do? (1/2)
What a test will appraise or measure depends on what
testers wish to know and what the testers believe a test
to be. There is indeed a difference between:
•Competence testing, which is used to measure
candidates’ acquired capability to understand and
produce a certain level of foreign language, defined by
phonological, lexical grammatical, sociolinguistic and
discourse constituents. In order to make test-takers’
competence measurable and visible, testers turn of
necessity to their actual performance which may
indicate their competence.
 What do tests do? (2/2)
Performance testing, which includes direct, systematic
observation of an actual student performance or
examples of student performances and rating of that
performance according to pre-established performance
criteria. Students are assessed on the result as well as
the process engaged in a complex task or creation of a
product. / A performance test measures performance on
tasks requiring the application of learning in an actual or
simulated setting. Either the test stimulus, the desired
response, or both are intended to lend a high degree of
realism to the test situation.
Do tests test one or many things at
a time?
There are two different types of tests:
•Integrative tests, which include activities that
assess skills and knowledge in an integrated
manner (e.g., reading and writing, listening and
speaking).
•Discrete point tests, which contain items that
ideally reveal the candidate's ability to handle one
level of language and one element of receptive or
productive skills.
 For whom are tests important?
(1/2)
For almost all the people involved in the education
process:
•the learner who wants to know how well s/he is
doing, and also wants the 'piece of paper for
professional and education purposes,
•the teacher wants to know how the learner is
progressing and whether and how well s/he herself
is succeeding in his job,
 For whom are tests important?
(2/2)
• the parents, who want to make sure that they’re
getting their money’s worth,
• educational authorities and others who have
some interest in the learner's progress or his/her
proficiency level,
• the potential employer who relies heavily on
what tests tell him/her about learner proficiency
levels.
Why else is testing important? (1/2)
Because of its backwash effect.
•What does this mean? It is the effect that
testing has on teaching. For better or worse,
tests and exams exert control over what goes
on in classrooms. This is because very many
language classes are geared more or less
directly to the tests or examinations the
learners will end up taking. Teachers must
often 'teach to' a test.
Why else is testing important? (2/2)
• Is the quality of tests important for teaching? Yes.
– If the test is a bad one (or the teacher is too narrow
in his/her interpretation of it), the result may be
negative washback, where we can say that
teaching suffers because of the test coming at the
end of the course.
– If the test is a good one, and its nature well
understood by the teacher, the effect on the
teaching may be very positive. There will be
positive backwash.
Considerations when constructing a
test
There are two basic considerations when
constructing a test. It must be valid and reliable.
The first concept first:
•Validity is commonly defined as 'the extent to
which [a test] measures what it is supposed to
measure and nothing else. If a test is valid, the
outsider who looks at an individual's score knows
that it is a true reflection of the individual's skill in
the area the test claims to have covered.
 Kinds of validity (1/3)
• Content validity. A test is said to have content
validity if the items or tasks of which it is made
up constitute a representative sample of items or
tasks for the area of knowledge or ability to be
tested (often related to a syllabus or a course).
• Construct validity. A test is said to have
construct validity if the scores that a candidate
gets on this relate in the same way to another
test or form of assessment for the same aspect
of knowledge.
 Kinds of validity (2/3)
• Empirical validity. A measure of the validity of
a test arrived at by comparing the test with one
or more criterion measures.
• Face validity. The extent to which a test
appeals to candidates or to those choosing it on
behalf of the candidates because it is
considered to be an acceptable measure of the
ability they wish to measure. It is sometimes
referred to as ‘test appeal’.
 Kinds of validity (3/3)
• Predictive validity. A type of validity based on
the degree to which a test accurately predicts
future performance. A language aptitude test for
example, should have predictive validity
because the results of the test should predict the
ability to learn a foreign language.
 Important consideration in
testing
Reliability is another very important consideration when
testing.
•Relibility refers to the consistency of a test. That is, if
every time the test is administered it will have the same
outcome. But reliability does not have to do with the
content of the test alone; it has to do with marking in
two ways:
– ensuring that different raters give comparable
marks to the same script,
– the same raters give the same marks on two
different occasions to the same script.
 Kinds of reliability (1/2)
Reliability is most often estimated with regard to:
•The internal consistency in a test; that is, if there
is correlation among the variables comprising the
test.
•The results when testing and re-testing; that is, if
there is correlation between two (or more)
administrations of the same item, scale, or
instrument for different times, locations, or
populations, when the two administrations do not
differ in other relevant variables.
 Kinds of reliability (2/2)
• Inter-rater reliability, which refers to the level of
agreement between two or more evaluators/
judges/ raters on a particular instrument at a
particular time. They are to apply their marks in
a manner that is predictable and replicable.
Therefore, note that inter-rater reliability is a
property of the testing situation, and not of the
instrument itself.