Page 183 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Effective Assessment

such as at the end of a lesson, unit, or school year (Brumen & Garrote Salazar,
2022). It is based on cumulative learning experiences, tests for achievement,
and mastery of specific performance objectives. The teacher’s role is to eval-
uate student’s performance at the end of an instructional unit by comparing
it against standards. Summative assessments are often high stakes, which
means that they have a high point value. Some typical examples of sum-
mative assessment are: a class exam or test which is graded, an oral perfor-
mancebyastudent which endswith agrade,anationalassessment ofknowl-
edge.
Several authors argue that we need both types of assessment in foreign
language instruction. Dixson and Worrell (2016) argue that the two types of
assessment serve different purposes and should therefore be seen as com-
plementary. While formative assessment is best employed throughout the
learning process to help learners deal with their strengths and weaknesses,
summative assessments can be used at the end of a learning period to eval-
uate the learning outcome.

Effective Assessment
Assessment should reflect the learner’s actual skills and abilities as closely as
possible (McKay, 2006; Brown, 2004; Bachman & Palmer, 1996). To ensure that
this is the case, teachers need to consider the following criteria: reliability,
validity, authenticity, interactivity, feasibility, and the washback effect.

How Reliable is the Assessment Task?
For a language assessment to be reliable, the results need to be accurate and
consistent. A reliable test will give similar results with a similar group of learn-
ers who take the same test under identical conditions (Bachman & Palmer,
1996). It is useful to consider that if a learner’s specific knowledge or ability
is assessed differently by two different teachers or by using different assess-
ment tasks, the degree of assessment reliability will be low (McKay, 2006).
There are several ways in which reliability may be enhanced, such as giving
learners longer tests with more items. However, this is not necessarily a feasi-
ble strategy with YLs as they have a short attention span. One idea is, for ex-
ample, to divide the assessment task into two parts, two 20-min tests, rather
than a 40-min assessment session. We also need to consider that assessment
reliability may be affected in a variety of ways. Some of the threats that are
particularly relevant for YLs are unclear or ambiguously worded instructions,
too long tasks, disruptive classroom conditions (such as too much noise), and
poor concentration at the end of the school day.

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