Assessing Students Learning Achievement,
is it Applied the way it should?
Corroborating students’ effective
learning is one of the central concerns for us teachers, especially at the end
of the school year. The question is whether by this time we have at our
disposal the precise information to substantiate students’ learning
achievement. Is it enough to take the final exam and bestow the scores to say
the process has been accomplished and everybody is ready to move on to the next
step?
Unfortunately, the standards oblige
institutions and English teachers to follow the system and the fact of being
involved in this, makes teachers finalize the academic year with still another
exam. One more with the same characteristics: structure, scores, and out of the
expected context of production. Frequently, exams are taken from the textbook
CDs, thus limiting teachers´ creativity and ways to exploit students’
performance in real-like contexts; and this does not only occur at the end of
the year, but during the whole leaning process as well.
When do students
learn more effectively?
Practice has shown that when students
know what the learning goals are they get more involved and try harder to make
things work. The suggestion: good planning. This will provide students better
performance opportunities and allow teachers to implement a goal-oriented
coaching process. This may sound unconvincing at first, but effective learning
requires attention to outcomes and demands the acquisition of the know-how that
leads to those outcomes. Here is when assessment helps the learning process and
provides information to identify which students learn best under what
conditions. So teachers are able to make the necessary adjustments at the right
time.
Assess, why?
Assessment results can be used for many purposes. However, applying the
following: a diagnostic assessment at the beginning of the school year, formative assessment during the whole
process, and the summative assessment at the end of it, not only will allow
teachers to get information to gauge the course grades, but to know how much
students have learned.
Assess, what?
On the other hand, what to asess is one of the greatest challenges foreign
language teachers face due to the pressure to encompass the curriculum. This often converts teachers into mere data
providers; and, as a consequence, unnecessary papers are assigned, and too many
tests are applied which do not produce the expected results. The point is,
teachers need to monitor progress toward the intended goals in a spirit of
continuous improvement. Beginning with clear objectives
should be the first step. Later on, setting different aims will require
different types of assessment. Some of them will facilitate to provide the
necessary data, while others will serve to empower students to identify their
best way to learn. This second group of assessment tools will help students to
become problem solving, decision making, creative individuals, and much more, just as the new
generation of students needs to be.
Designing assessment instruments to do what you want?
It
has been stated that where program purposes lack specificity or agreement, assessment
as a process moves forward toward clarity about where to aim and what standards
to apply. With the advent of norms, it is
expected to see students performing in authentic contexts and situations using
the foreign language they learned in class. So assessment will demonstrate that
students reached the standards in bigger or lesser dimensions.
The end of the year is approaching and
we should ask if students are ready to be problem solvers, critical thinkers,
tech savvy, you name it.
As educators, our responsibility is huge.
If we don’t have a clear idea where we are going, we may or may not get there.
Performance assessment will allow us to check not only for engagement, but also
for deeper learning. Effective assessment is no longer done to students, but
with them.
Thanks for
following and telling us how you are using assessment
to empower students to
own their learning.
Bio Data:
Carmen Hurtado, graduated in the
educational field and studies in EFL - Universidad de Piura with over more than
20 years of experience teaching English, Spanish and tutoring students of different
age-groups with great satisfaction. She has also participated as a lecturer in
the late Annual Congresses at CIDUP and is currently working as Academic
Coordinator at Universidad del Pacífico Language Centre.
