In the beginning of the Assessment and Evaluation course we were asked to come up with a Personal Learning Plan, which you can find here. My personal goal for this course was to be able to clearly differentiate between assessment and evaluation and to be able to choose effective assessment and evaluation tools for various activities. How was I going to achieve my goal? I was planning to a) study the materials provided by our instructor; b) participate in the discussion forums and talking circles c) ask my colleagues and instructor questions d) search additional information on the Internet if needed.
Before taking this course I was using these two terms interchangeably but after participating in the discussion forums and attending talking circles, I realized that in most situations we could use both terms. However, the main distinction is that “evaluation” is used to provide a grade or a score when “assessment’ is used as a measure of progress. Another difference between these terms lies in their form - assessment can be formative or summative when evaluation is mostly summative.
In regards to my second goal, which is “to be able to choose the most efficient assessment or evaluation tool in a particular learning activity”, I can say that I found most of my answers when learning about productive (speaking and writing) and receptive (listening and reading) tasks. I have to admit - doing quizzes on this topic was definitely thought-provoking but at the same time it caused a lot of anxiety (although it is sometimes helpful to find yourself in your students' shoes). I have realized that I can’t define the best method of assessment for this or that particular activity unless I take other factors into consideration such as learners’ age and background, level of language proficiency, the topic they are studying. If, let’s say I have developed a test to test students’ reading skills, the outcomes will be different for students taking academic reading course and students taking a general English course. In this case, the test will be lacking construct validity.
One of the things I will definitely start implementing in my teaching is offering larger variety when assessing communicative function such as, for example, production, description or comparison; think of more fun ways to produce the function like presentations, role-plays or conversations. I will also try to make the assessment more authentic to keep my students motivated and engaged.
Here are some of my a-ha moments during the course:
Always start with the needs assessment. To be honest, before the course I tended to focus more on the diagnostic assessment before taking on a new student. I used to just talk to my students about their goals in an informal way to understand what their needs are but now I am definitely going to be doing it in a more professional and formal way as it one of the main tools the teacher can use to make the student’s learning meaningful and relevant. I have already tailored the existing needs assessment for my IT students adding questions about their most and least favourite activities in the class, language skills they find easy/difficult and situations when they usually need English. I have already had a great conversation with one of my students who was convinced that she needed to heavily focus on grammar to be able to make better presentations at work. After going over her needs assessment and situations where she most often uses English, she has come to realize that she mostly needs to be focusing on her speaking skills.
When providing feedback to students, instead of pointing at the errors they have made, help them understand why they have made that error. Also it’s important to remember to provide feedback relevant to the topic they have studied and not to overwhelm them with too much information. This can easily demotivate them. I can apply this principle to my teaching by prioritizing and only providing feedback that is most relevant to students’ needs. For example, I have stopped correcting my students when they send me personal messages via texts about rescheduling lessons or sharing some information.
Another a-ha moment for me was when we were asked to analyze assessments for productive and receptive tasks. I found CLB is very helpful when providing teachers guidance on how to develop assessment tools. In the future in my practice I will be referring to this document and looking at profiles of ability for different skills ( what the students can do) and features of communication such as context or difficulty of tasks.
In order to evaluate my personal learning goal, I created a rubric to evaluate my achievements this course. You can find the rubric here.
I am using the four-point system to evaluate criteria - not achieved, partly achieved, achieved and easily achieved. I have also added a few goals that I set before the course but didn’t include in the learning plan to make my evaluation a little more interesting.
I have scored three points in each criteria related to new knowledge I have gained in this course. I didn’t give myself the max number of points on any criteria as “achieved easily” interprets as “exceeding expectations” and I don’t think I have done that ( or I’m trying to stay humble). I have also included one of the task-related goals in my rubric ( writing reflections after each unit) and, unfortunately, I can say that I haven’t achieved it. However, I put more effort into attending Talking Circle meetings and participating in live discussions which I really enjoyed.
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