Assessment

LT 549 - Measuring Language Ability

Assessment Creation Activity: Reading

During LT 549, I had the chance to develop sample assessment tasks for other skills, such as the interpretive skill of reading. Designing production and receptive tasks require different considerations to be made with regard to learners and areas of reliability and validity. This reading assessment targets the same learners and context as the writing assessment and is also a formal and summative assessment. For this assessment, learners are being assessed on their achievement of interpretive reading; specifically, it addresses macro skills in reading related to identifying the main idea and specific details in an informational passage (Brown & Abeywickrama, 2019). Learners read four short passages and answer either five-to-seven multiple choice questions (a selected response task) or three short-answer questions (a limited response task) for each reading passage (Carr, 2011); for short-answer questions, learners are asked to respond in their L1 (Japanese) to maintain construct validity. In this assessment creation activity, the example passage also shows the careful consideration of multiple factors. When it comes to reading, language teachers must determine the difficulty of the passage—tools such as the English Vocab Profiler and Flesch-Kincaid readability test allow language teachers to view quantitative data about the reading passage they’ve chosen. However, the difficulty of words within the passage is not the only aspect to consider; learners might have more or less familiarity with a specific topic or genre, and teachers must consider whether this could give an unfair advantage or disadvantage to certain students. In this assessment, the passage was about a generally familiar topic (holidays) in a now-familiar genre of text (general informational text), which increases construct validity as well. Students had been learning about this topic and reading passages of this genre in class before the assessment; therefore, the assessment aligned with course content (Coombe et al., 2007). The assessment itself is highly practical as well. It’s taken within the class period, and relative to grading extended response tasks, multiple-choice and short-answer questions—with the assistance of an easy-to-use rubric—can be quickly graded. This assessment exhibits the multitude of considerations present in creating assessments, and my ability to take those considerations into account when designing carefully crafted assessments that align with the learning context and learning outcomes. 

LING 594 - English Grammar

Grammar Lesson Plan: Compound Sentences

My final artifact, a lesson plan from LING 594, demonstrates how formative and informal assessment can be integrated throughout a lesson plan to provide learners with feedback that can drastically benefit their learning. This lesson was designed for an EAP course and focuses on creating compound sentences to increase the complexity of learners’ writing. Students receive multiple opportunities for both peer feedback and feedback from the teacher. For example, in the first activity of the lesson, groups of students create compound sentences using conjunctive adverbs, but later on in the lesson—after learning about punctuation—they go back to their original compound sentences and try to correct any incorrect punctuation they’ve noticed they originally had. The teacher can provide more feedback if necessary, but this allows students to self-assess their own work in groups. Another example is present later in the lesson when learners turn in paragraphs they wrote after interviewing fellow students; although this paragraph is not graded based on accuracy, it is still given formative feedback by the teacher so students can learn from it. This activity acts as an example of formal, but formative assessment with positive washback as it can guide the teacher to either focus more on compound sentences after this lesson or move on to the next topic (Hughes, 2003 as cited by Brown & Abeywickrama, 2019). Lastly, learners are given the opportunity to peer review past written work; before this lesson, students were asked to write and describe a favorite memory from their past. Now, in class, students swap their homework, and provide feedback to each other on the specific areas covered in class—this maintains construct validity, face validity, and is highly practical. Developing peer feedback skills also helps them develop thorough academic skills for future coursework. This lesson plan showcases how the integration of multiple opportunities for different kinds of formative assessment within a class lesson can benefit language learning.