Testing

I believe classroom-based tests are usually pretty good indicators of how a student is performing in a class. They are better for testing particular knowledge or skills that a lesson or a course is aimed at teaching though than they are for testing overall proficiency. So for example, a test would be good for seeing if a student learned particular rules of grammar in a foreign language class, but probably not as good for testing how well they are able to employ those grammar rules in their speech and writing on a consistent basis.

I believe I am a good test taker and know all of the good strategies and thought processes for taking a good exam. For many students, I do think there are many factors that can affect test scores more than just how well a student knows the material. Some possible influences are nerves, lack of test-taking strategies, and weird questions like those that are worded badly or are ‘gotcha’ questions. Still, I think a well formed exam will elicit responses that indicate whether a student knows what they need to know or not. So to me, being a bad test-taker is not a very good excuse, but maybe someone will make me change my mind on that!

Testing language skills can be done in a ton of ways. It’s not like a math class where it is hard to deviate from just one way of testing. I think it’s important for a teacher to know what they want to test when making an assessment. If you only want to assess if the students know how to conjugate particular verbs, make sure other parts of the conjugation test, like reading comprehension, are not going to be what messes them up. The test should be simple enough that if a student gets something wrong, you know that it’s only because they do not know the conjugation, and not because of some other aspect of the question. It’s okay to test overall comprehension, proficiency, or another skill as well in other assessments, or other parts of this one, but not where you want to know their conjugation skills/memorization.

I think when testing overall proficiency, it may be better to test on one of the four core (reading, writing, listening, speaking) at a time. If you want to test their writing abilities, make sure you have set up the exam so that it will not be their lack of reading comprehension abilities to perform well on the writing part. This is just like what I was saying above with the conjugations.

Finally, I think quizzes and tests, even in the language classroom, are best, especially for summative assessments. They are efficient, careful, and direct. However, I am not at all opposed to using projects, presentations, etc. every so often too.

Formative assessments is a whole other category that I did not really talk about here, but you can do this in a ton of different ways. Formative assessments can be much more diverse and creative. And they can tell you what you need to teach better efficiently and before it is too late.