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If asked how I believe ESOL students should be assessed, I would be hard pressed to answer. In order to answer such as question, I would have to have a very clear picture of the situation. I would have to know a lot about the students, the goals of the course, and the purpose of the assessment. For this reason, my approach in assessing language learners has been different in every place I have ever worked. And, for this reason, I am still trying to find a system I am satisfied with in my new job. I am currently teaching ESOL in a U.S. public high school. In my current job, I want to find a manner of assessing my students that will satisfy all my needs as well as theirs. I should satisfy my expectations, the students’ expectations, the school’s expectations, and the parents’ expectations. This is really not easy considering that they may at times conflict. For starters, I won’t feel good about my approach to assessment if I don’t think it is fair to all my students. In the last ten years of teaching I have seen many students who weren’t good at taking certain types of tests. They did poorly on certain types of tests no matter how much they studied and no matter how much they knew about what was being tested. Those tests were valid in the eyes of the students and other professionals, but for some reason, they did not always measure the learning that I felt they should have been measuring. One reason for this is because tests are often biased towards specific intelligence types or cultures. I cannot be happy knowing that my tests have such a bias, but in my opinion most tests do. For this reason I don’t subscribe to the fallacy that it is necessarily “fair” to grade students according to the same criteria and that no other “fair” option is available. I also need to know that I am testing only what was taught and not expecting students to perform some task that I never prepared them for. It is my job to teach them to perform. Although many teachers are comfortable with having students demonstrate their knowledge of some content or skill in some new way---in some new format, new task, or new thinking skill---I am not. I don’t believe it is valid to assess the transfer of learned skills or knowledge to a new context (unless of course that is what one intends to assess). Testing the transfer of the skill is different from assessing the actual learning of the skill or knowledge. If I want my students to transfer learned knowledge to a new context, then we practice a similar transfer in class first. At the same time, I don’t like my tests to be “the end of the story.” Tests and quizzes are learning activities too. Students can learn from them. They involve problem solving. I hate assessing something and then just moving on. Students should be given the chance to learn from their failures and successes. They should be given another chance to do it right, just like a driving test. What’s the point of giving a student a grade and then moving on? I also like to give choices. Some students don’t do well on tests because they aren’t focusing on the same thing that the teacher is when they study. When students are working on some unit, there’s no telling what they are really learning, especially in ESOL. For example, if I want them to be working on mastery of articles, who’s to say that they are psycholinguistically ready to learn articles? Who’s to say that they aren’t learning something else instead? Why isn’t that also being assessed? Why does the teacher always need to choose what is being assessed? I suspect that students might perform better if given choices. I suspect that some students might rise to the challenge of responsibility if given choices and allowed to set their own goals and standards. We have to acknowledge that each of our students is different and that grading them by the exact same criteria doesn’t necessarily get the best results for learning. Another of my concerns is that the assessment not contradict the goals of the course. This happens more often than we would like to admit. Teachers often have objectives---measurable and observable outcomes that can be tested. Teachers also tend to have learning goals that cannot be formed into performance objectives. For example, the objectives might be that the student be able to apply certain reading strategies to get information from text. It is a testable performance. The goal however, might be for the student to learn to love or at least appreciate reading in English and feel good about herself when doing it. These two can contradict if the testing and pressure to perform becomes unpleasureable. This problem is more common when teachers modify their courses to focus on getting students through some high stakes testing. I need a system for evaluating my students that is manageable however. I am a very busy man. I do not have the facility to collect all the data I want, and I cannot function well with a system that is overly complicated. I need a system that is easy enough for me and doesn’t interfere with me doing my job or having a life outside of work. I cannot spend all my class time assessing students, negotiating how they will be assessed, or explaining the system. I want to spend more time teaching and less time gathering data. Likewise, my students need to spend more time learning and less time taking tests. Not only does the system have to be manageable for me, but it also has to be manageable for my students. I cannot expose my students to some assessment system that is too confusing for them to make sense of. They need to be able to do the math themselves so they can see that the making of their grade is no mystery and so they can see the effects of their decisions (e.g. not doing homework). Doing their own math helps them to realize that the determination of their grades is not arbitrary, that they don’t get grades simply based on their intelligence, and that they can get a better grade if only they do the work. The assessment system also has to fit into certain predictable routines that the students can adapt to. They need to know, for example, that when they finish a unit, there will be a formal assessment that takes their learning into account. They need to know what kind of assessment will be used so they can prepare for it. These routines foster better attention and study habits. It’s for all these reasons that I have spent a lot of time fiddling around with my grading system since becoming a high school teacher. It is also for these reasons that I still have not found any system that I am satisfied with. When I first stepped in, I tried an alternative to the system other teachers were using. Other teachers simply gave assessments and placed a point value on each one, then used the final total earned to arrive at a percentage grade (e.g. 10 points for homework, 50 points for quizzes, 100 points for tests). I wanted to take more into account. My alternative system based the final grade on five criteria, each worth 20%. They were as follows: (1) successful completion of lesson objectives (graded in daily informal assessments), (2) apparent effort in class participation, preparation, portfolios, journal keeping, and projects (graded in anecdotal records), (3) performances on tests, quizzes, and daily “drills” (graded in formal assessment), (4) improvement evidenced in portfolios, homework, tests, participation, and other such performances (graded in anecdotal records reflecting on changes), (5) completion of homework assignments (graded according to the percentage complete and correct). I chose this system because it seemed fair. It didn’t place too much weight on any one thing and allowed hardworking students with lower proficiency to get good grades. I didn’t want to just grade students according to their language performances; that would be unfair to students who entered the course with lower proficiency. I wanted to be able to take effort and improvement into account. I also wanted a system that had both formal assessments and informal assessments. I wanted students to have a variety of ways to show their value, effort, and growth. I guess you could say that when I first started public schools, my concern was more over what to assess than how to assess. This alternative system turned out to be problematic however. Students kept on asking me how many points various assignments were worth and I couldn’t give a simple answer they could understand. They needed a simpler system like the ones the other teachers were using. I also found it difficult to measure some of my criteria, especially improvement and effort. To further complicate matters, many things crossed over and got blurry. I decided that I still liked the balance that the old system gave but that I would have to use it as a guide for me in designing another system that has the same balance but can be understood by the students. I now use a point system similar to the other teachers but use the old system to help me decide what kinds of opportunities to earn points need to be provided. For example, in my current system, I offer various daily assessments, both formal and informal. For example, I start lessons with some “daily drill” (as required by the school) that requires students to open the book, glance at their homework, search their memory of yesterday’s lesson, or check their notes for the answer. These are done daily and collected randomly. Each one is worth 10 points up front so it is concrete enough for the students to understand. These drills account for preparation and participation, and offer a daily account of performance holding students accountable in many ways. They can also be used to facilitate learning by getting the students to focus as soon as they sit down, to hold them accountable, to teach them organization, and activate background knowledge at the beginning of a lesson. Besides drills I also tend to end my classes with short ten-point quizzes on the day’s content. Knowing that they might be assessed at the end of the lesson really keeps students on their toes. In these quizzes they are never expected to do more than what I supposedly taught them to do in the lesson. Besides daily drills and quizzes, I can also simply watch them perform various functions and tasks in class and grade them for those informally for ten points each. These tasks can be more authentic than quizzes and provide some variety. I can even throw in another ten point check based on whether they are “on task” in class time or not. This takes class participation into account and is an easy way to keep them all on task. All these different daily checks tell me whom I am reaching and how successfully I am teaching. Besides the many ten point daily grades, I still give various types of assessments that test the end of units or sections. The practice of giving a final evaluation to close a unit meets students’ expectations and is familiar to them, but I am still trying to find a way that satisfies me and caters to a variety of students. So far I have gotten in the habit of assessing units by turning the reading selection into a cloze test. The students have come to expect this and they have learned that it helps to read the selections repeatedly, keep word banks, and master the vocabulary and grammar of the selection. I like this format because the students who have read the passage more than once do well and students who haven’t don’t. When students do cloze activities they can use a combination of their knowledge of the text from previous readings, their ability to make meaning of the text both bottom up and top down, and their ability to use that meaning making process along with knowledge of the words or forms in the word bank to make their choices. Moreover, it focuses on meaning and context along with a wide variety of rather authentic language skills related to literacy. And, they are easy to make and grade. I would like something more than this though. Other options I have considered would be brief interview exams and in class writing based on the content of the unit. The interview exams could be difficult logistically since I have so many students in each class, but they could be recorded for a sort of audio portfolio to document progress and learning. The writing exams could be problematic because they send the wrong message when my goal is to teach writing as a process, and an act of communication with an audience and a purpose. More in line with my message about writing would be portfolio assessment, which I am using with some success. These days I have taken to grading writing more on the basis of how well it meets my expectations as written in the description of the assignment and based on what they were taught and models that were provided. For example, if I am focusing on topic sentences and a student hands in work with no topic sentences, then I won’t be too pleased. Students are told that, if they do the writing assignment to the best of their effort, they will get 100 points, but that they will have to follow my advice (or their own judgement) to make some improvements on it for entry into the portfolio. They are told that the portfolio is a finished product and should look like some sort of publication. Each time it is collected is worth 200 points. They are told that they will be graded for its completeness and either its perfectness or the improvements it shows. Students are still confused but some are beginning to rewrite their work repeatedly to make each one perfect in its own way. This is the effect I want. On the other hand, I am still working towards a feasible model of an oral portfolio using digital voice recordings. On a final note, given the fact that other classes all give grades and assessments, grades and assessments become necessary. Firstly, if I don’t give grades and assessments then students will choose to focus more on the other classes and less on mine. This would simply be a matter of good time management on their part considering how overscheduled kids are these days. Secondly, many students would not take my course seriously if there were no assessments. Thirdly, part of my job as an ESOL teacher is to prepare them to take tests in the future. What better way of teaching them about language tests than by giving them language tests? On the other hand, I hope that assessment can do more than provide extrinsic motivation (coercion). As stated earlier, assessment activities are also more opportunities for students to learn. In assessments they are challenged to apply what they have learned to solve problems. They find gaps in their knowledge and notice things they didn’t notice before. They can also be set into teams for cooperative learning projects in which they learn from each other. I frequently use the teams quiz routine from Kagan. Alternative assessments such as shows, presentations, and publications also provide valuable data on student progress while motivating them and providing more learning opportunities as well. Assessment may be a necessary evil but it mustn’t necessarily be evil.
SAMPLES OF ASSESSMENTS
example of a simple scale to grade assignments (homework and papers)
For example, if the assignment was as follows… Write a story that teaches a lesson about values such as the folktale the Rooster and the Jewel. It should include the elements of narratives we discussed in the lesson and should use the past tense correctly. the “expectations” I am assessing are those stated in the assignment. The grade focuses mainly on what they were taught in class instead of everything. The four point holistic scale makes it simple for me to grade them, thus making my life easier and doing no harm.
Notice that, in this scale, students who try to do the work will get a grade above failing. Only students who never try get a zero.
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