THE ADVANTAGES OF RUBRICS

Rubrics

Definition: It is a scoring guide to evaluate students’ performance.

Types of rubrics:

1.       Analytical:  Identifies and assess components of a finished product.

2.       Holistic: Assesses student work as a whole.

3.       Weighted: Judges certain concepts heavier than others.

Characteristics:

1.       It is an authentic assessment tool.

2.       It is a working guide for students and teachers.

3.       It enhances the quality of direct instruction.

4.       They can be created for any content area including math, science and others.

Uses:

1.       Guide to build on current knowledge.

2.       Reviewing, reconceptualizing and revisiting concepts from different angles.

Advantages:

1.       Increase the quality of direct instruction by providing focus.

2.       Have explicit guidelines regarding teacher expectations.

3.       Students can use rubrics as a tool to develop their abilities.

4.       Teacher can reuse rubrics for various activities.

How to create an Original Rubric

1.       Determine the concepts to be taught

2.       Choose the criteria to be evaluated

3.       Develop a grid, plug the concepts and criteria

4.       Share the rubric with students before they begin writing

5.       Evaluate the end product

ASSESSING SPEAKING

CHAPTER 6

Theory of Speaking Assessment:

          There are four competencies supporting the speaking ability:

1.      Grammatical competence (sounds of letters, pronunciation, intonation and stress.

2.      Discourse competence (relationships beyond sentence level, cohesion, coherence and communication in a meaningful way).

3.      Sociolinguistic competences (applying knowledge of what is expected socially and culturally by users of the target language).

4.      Strategic competence (the way the learners use language to carry out communicative purposes).

Designing Speaking Assessments:

Formal speaking assessment techniques:

Parts:

a.     Warm up

b.     Level check

c.     Probe

d.     Wind down

Types of assessments:

1.      Picture cue

2.      Prepared monologue

3.      Role play

4.      Information gap activity

5.      Oral presentations

6.      Debate on a controversial topic

7.      Reading aloud

8.      Retelling stories

9.      Verbal essays

10.  Extemporaneous speaking

Rubrics for assessing speaking:

         They basically should include grammar, vocabulary, fluency and pronunciation and levels from excellent to unacceptable or poor.

ASSESSING LISTENING

CHAPTER 5

Definition: It is an active process whereby students receive, conctruct meaning from and respond to spoken messages.

Models of listening:

1.    Bottom up: Decoding of messages from the smallest meaningful units to complete texts.

2.    Top down: Use of background knowledge of the context and situation to make sense of whet is heard.

Approaches to Listening Assessment:

1.    Discrete-point: It broke listening into component elements and assessed them separately. For example, phoneme discrimination.

2.    Integrative: It attempts to assess a learner’s capacity to use many bits of language at the same time.

3.    Communicative: In this, the listener must be able to comprehend the message and then use it in context.

Considerations in designing Listening Tasks:

1. background knowledge

2. test content

3. texts

4.Vocabulary

5. test structure

6. formats

7. item writing

8. timing

9. skill contamination

Techniques for Assessing Listening Comprehension

•Paraphrase recognition

•short answer

•cloze

•dictation

•information transfer and notetaking 

•listening test delivery: recording voiceovers

•scoring: use questions that are right or wrong

ASSESSING WRITING

CHAPTER 4

•ASSESSING WRITING

•Approaches

•Indirect: corrects usage in sentence level

•Direct: measures students' ability to communicate

•Designing assessment tasks

•1.rubric

•2.prompt

•3.expected response

•4.post-task evaluation

•Techniques for Assessing Writing: guided writing, free-writing

•Issues in Writing Assessment: time allocation, process vrs product, use of technology, topic restriction

•Authentic Writing Assessment: Student-teacher conferences, self-assessment, peer assessment, portfolio-based assessment.

•Scales: Holistic and Analiytical

ASSESSING READING

CHAPTER 3

1.         Approaches to reading:

One of the most accurate approaches about reading includes both bottom –up skills recognizing and making sense of letters, words and sentences- and top down processing that deals with whole texts.

Reading is an interactive skill in which the background knowledge or schemata that the reader brings to the task is constantly interwoven with the new material.

2.       Reading sub skills:

2.1.     Major skills:

Skimming, scanning and establishing overall organization of the passage

Reading for main ideas, supporting details, arguments and purpose, relationship of paragraphs and fact versus opinion.

Information transfer from non linear texts.

Drawing inferences from both stated and implied content.

2.2.  Minor or enabling skills:

Understanding at a sentence level

Understanding at inter-sentence level

Understanding components of nonlinear texts

3.       Specifications: They are useful for ensuring even coverage of the main skills and the course content as well as developing tests based on same guidelines. Some of their features are: content, conditions and grading criteria.

4.       General considerations:

4.1.     Use texts from different sources: newspapers, books, magazines, brochures and real texts.

4.2.   Include both prose passages and nonlinear texts from tables, schedules, maps, ads and diagrams.

4.3.   Avoid controversial or biased material.

4.4.   Check the languages of your reading texts.

4.5.   Write lower level questions than the reading passages.

4.6.   Reading questions should be done in the same order as the material in the passage itself.

5.       Common formats:

5.1.     Rational deletion cloze

5.2.   Multiple choice

5.3.   True / false / not given

5.4.   Short answer

5.5.   Sequencing tasks

5.6.   Combination tasks

TECHNIQUES FOR TESTING

•CLASSIFICATION OF TEST ITEMS AND  TASKS

•Objective: short answer-closed response items.

•Multiple choice questions

•True / False format

•Matching format

•Cloze / Gap Fills items

•Short answer / Completion items

•Subjective:longer and more open-ended response items.

•Essay questions

THE PROCESS OF DEVELOPING ASSESSMENT

BY PROF. LICDA CINDY GUTIÉRREZ NAVARRO


       

CHAPTER 1.

Assessment is an integral part of the entire curriculum cycle, not something tacked on as an afterthought to teaching. First, a needs analysis dictate the necessary standards required to define the overall aims for a particular level of instruction. Now, these standards need to be converted into more specific course objectives or outcomes to be accomplished in a particular course. Based on the outcomes, worded in terms of the actual student performance, it is time to develop assessment specifications to plan documents or recipes for particular assessments such as tests and projects.

STEPS OF THE ASSESSMENT PROCESS

1.   Planning:

1.1.              Choosing the type of assessment according to needs

1.2.              Mapping the content and main objectives of the course.

1.3.              Autonomy

2.   Specifications: They are a detailed description of what exactly is being assessed and how it is done. They provide an opportunity to clarify assessment decisions and ensure validity and reliability.

3.   Constructing the assessment:

3.1.              Write sections and individual items.

3.2.              Prepare an answer key.

3.3.              Give the exam both electronically and in hard copies. 

IMPORTANT MATTERS ON EVALUATING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

BY PROF. LICDA. CINDY GUTIÉRREZ NAVARRO

Introduction to Issues in Language Assessment and Terminology

When referring to Terms related to assessement, it is necessary to keep in mind the following words in order to avoid either misunderstandings and mistakes when using each of them, as stated by Coombe, Christine et all in their book "A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO ASSESSING ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS (2010)":

EVALUATION: It is all inclusive and is the widest basis for collecting information in evaluation. It encompasses the whole process since planning until carrying out final tests and even reflection on them.
ASSESSMENT: It is a part of evaluation and refers to a variety of ways of collecting information on a learner's language ability and achievement.
TESTING: It is a part of assessment. It is a formal  and  systematic procedure to gauge learners' achievements.