According to Shin and Crandall (2013), assessment is the process of identifying learning goals and determining how well students are meeting them. It is something that is ongoing, a process of monitoring learning and teaching. It encompasses the multiple ways that teachers gather information about learners’ knowledge, abilities, attitudes, and motivation and note the progress or difficulties that students are having in learning English.
Informal Assessment
As teachers, we assess our learners informally more often than we might think. We look over the shoulders of two students engaged in completing an exercise to see how they are doing; we provide brief comments like “Good job!” or “Want to try that again?” when our learners £ speaking; and we write on their papers, praising their efforts and making suggestions for improvement. We actually are assessing much of the time that we are teaching, noting where students seem to be having difficulties and trying new approaches.
Formal assessments
Formal assessments, however, are less frequent. They are systematic ways that we gauge student achievement. We use them periodically to inform both our learners and ourselves about how much students are learning. Tests are one type of formal assessment, but not all formal assessments are tests. Tests are usually short assessments, but we might ask students to keep a portfolio of their work that we then assess systematically at the end of a term; or to create a project that we can formally assess, using a rubric (defined below). While formal assessments are important (some are so important that they determine future placements or enrolments), informal assessments are more useful in daily teaching.
Formative and Summative
The primary purpose of classroom-based assessment is to provide teachers and programs with information to help in making decisions. We can do that by assessing learners during the course of instruction (formative assessment) or after the end of some portion of their course (summative assessment). Both of these are important since they provide information about student learning. The most important for teaching may be formative, but the most critical for learners is likely to be summative.
Formative assessment is the (usually informal) assessment that occurs during teaching and learning. This classroom-based assessment provides an ongoing picture of students’ language growth and development. Its primary function is to monitor students’ learning and to provide teachers with information needed “to make appropriate decisions concerning modifications to teaching procedures and learning activities”