standarized education

Standarized Testing in Education

By: Silvia Andrea Tarazona

 I had always heard the term standard in several fields, but honestly I did not really know what it referred to. When I started to work as a teacher I was asked to apply a standard test to a certain group of students that were selected “randomly” by the directives, aiming to get a high-quality certification.

What I found surprising, was that first, the certification was for the institution not for students, second, they were not really chosen randomly as they had stated, because they were the students that had obtained the best grades during the whole year. Third, I started to wonder about the rest of student… I mean if standard tests are designed equally for each student, are they supposed to know the same things even if they learn in different ways?... Are the education stakeholders giving priority to administrative purposes and academic certifications for schools instead of pedagogical approaches and students´ needs?....well, there is a lot of things to be debated about standardized education so here you can read my list of cons and pros of it, based on the presentation that my classmate Jorge gave in class about this topic.

Pros:

 Standardized testing in education is accompanied by a set of standards which provide teachers with guidance for what and when something needs to be taught. Without this structure a third grade teacher and a sixth grade teacher could be teaching the same content. Standardized testing is an objective procedure. Classroom grades given by a teacher are not subjective at all since those tests are scored by computers or by people who do not know the students.

Cons:

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1.    Standardized testing evaluates a student’s performance on one particular day and does not take into account external factors, such us anxiety, understanding, their particular needs, etc. Additionally, Standardized testing only measures the individual performance of the student instead of the overall growth of that student over the course of the year.

Standardized testing leads teachers to teach for the test. This practice can delay a student’s overall learning potential. Because they are being trained to perform exams not to learn for the sake of it.

Assessing Young Learners

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Test Design

I have already posted about the different ways we can assess students without using tests, exams, quizes, etc. I have highlighted the importance of the use of the alternative methods in education, as they are useful for teacher to give formative feedback to students inmediately and also aiming to encourage other teachers to use them too.

However, I can not deny that tests and summative assessment are important as well.

Tests are a measurement tool to keep track of students´ performance in certain domain. It is important that test are practical, reliable, that they have face validity, that they are authentic and also that they provide students with washback.

It is important that when we are designing a test, we take into account aspects such us the purpose of the tests, the specific goals we want students to achieve with the test, clear instructions, how the scoring is going to be and finally how feedback is going to be given to students.

There are different types of tests:

• Language Aptitude tests: focus on predict if a student will or will be not successful at learninig a language. It doesn´t mean that peopla can´t learn a language but these can of exams mainly want to see ¨how well ¨ learning will be.
• Proficiency tests: they assess the aspects of the language, how good or how bad a student is in the language. They are summative and feedback is very difficult to provide.
• Placement tests: they are useful to locate students is certain level of the language program or school taking into account their performance. 
• Diagnostic tests:  they help the teacher and learners to identify problems that they may have with the language. For example, in the first day of class at school or in an institute the teacher may apply a diagnotic test to see what areas of languega should be skipped and which ones should be included in the syllabus.
• Achievement tests: their main function is to find out if the objectives have been met. They are directly related to the classroom lesson, units or even a total curriculum.

    Steps to take into account:

• Assess clear, unambigous Objectives:  examining the objectives and determining the approìatness of them.
• Draw up test specification: making a broad outline of the test, establishing which skills are going to be tested, and deciding how items will look like.
• Devise test task:  take into account face validity to see how students oerceive the test, real-life contexts and language, cultural shock and potencial difficulties.

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Alternative Assessment

Alternative assessment uses activities that reveal what students can do with language, emphasizing their strengths instead of their weaknesses. Alternative assessment´s instruments are not only designed and structured differently from traditional tests, but are also graded or scored differently. Because alternative assessment is performance based, it helps instructors emphasize that the point of language learning is communication for meaningful purposes.

Alternative assessment methods work well in learner-centered classrooms because they are based on the idea that students can evaluate their own learning and learn from the evaluation process. These methods give learners opportunities to reflect on both their linguistic development and their learning processes (what helps them learn and what might help them learn better). Alternative assessment thus gives instructors a way to connect assessment with review of learning strategies.

Features of alternative assessment:

• Assessment is based on authentic tasks that demonstrate learners' ability to accomplish communication goals
• Instructor and learners focus on communication, not on right and wrong answers
• Learners help to set the criteria for successful completion of communication tasks
• Learners have opportunities to assess themselves and their peers.

Designing tasks for alternative assessment

Successful use of alternative assessment depends on using performance tasks that let students demonstrate what they can actually do with language. Fortunately, many of the activities that take place in communicative classrooms lend themselves to this type of assessment. These activities replicate the kinds of challenges, and allow for the kinds of solutions, that learners would encounter in communication outside the classroom.

The following criteria define authentic assessment activities:

• They are built around topics or issues of interest to the students
• They replicate real-world communication contexts and situations
• They involve multi-stage tasks and real problems that require creative use of language rather than simple repetition
• They require learners to produce a quality product or performance
• Their evaluation criteria and standards are known to the student
• They involve interaction between assessor (instructor, peers, self) and person assessed
• They allow for self-evaluation and self-correction as they proceed

Introducing alternative assessment

With alternative assessment, students are expected to participate actively in evaluating themselves and one another. Learners who are used to traditional teacher-centered classrooms have not been expected to take responsibility for assessment before and may need time to adjust to this new role. They also may be skeptical that peers can provide them with feedback that will enhance their learning.

Instructors need to prepare students for the use of alternative assessments and allow time to teach them how to use them, so that alternative assessment will make an effective contribution to the learning process.

• Introduce alternative assessment gradually while continuing to use more traditional forms of assessment. Begin by using checklists and rubrics yourself; move to self and peer evaluation later.
• Create a supportive classroom environment in which students feel comfortable with one another.
• Explain the rationale for alternative assessment.
• Engage students in a discussion of assessment. Elicit their thoughts on the values and limitations of traditional forms of assessment and help them see ways that alternative assessment can enhance evaluation of what learners can do with language.
• Give students guidance on how to reflect on and evaluate their own performance and that of others (see specifics in sections on peer and self evaluation).

As students find they benefit from evaluating themselves and their peers, the instructor can expand the amount of alternative assessment used in the classroom.

Assessing Listening and Speaking Skills

English teachers can assess progress in second language learning and its usage. Listening, speaking, reading and writing are the 4 skills that are going to be addressed in the process of learning. The order in which these are list coincides with the class of skill acquisition and the instruction. One cannot learn how to read before learning how to speak. It is crucial when developing lesson plans always keep this sequence in mind, to allow the most natural progression in language attainment.  Let´s focus on each skill one by one:

     1)     Listening is an active process in which the listeners select and interpret information and relate this information to what they already know. During the process of listening,  we are subject to the following steps: receive an aural stimulus, convert it into words, attach meaning into words, relate the message to past experiences and choose a proper response.  As well, Listening has used significantly more than any other language skill in daily life.

2)      speaking is closely related to the listening skills. Listening and speaking can be taught as communication skills. Meaningful communication is a very challenging skill for the students as they often feel that they understand their teacher and peers but have trouble communicating outside of the classroom. Therefore, it is necessary for teachers to present to students patterns of real interactions.  As stated earlier, effective communication (listening and speaking) is the number one reason that most of your students take English lessons. Even though your students, especially the adult ones, understand how useful and valuable this communication is, motivation may still be a challenge for the teacher. 

Micro skills

Refers to producing the small chunks of language (phonemes, morphemes, words, collocations, phrasal units)

Attending to the smaller bits and chunks of language, in more of bottom-up process

Macro skills

Imply the speaker’s focus on the larger elements; fluency, discourse, style, cohesion

Focusing on the larger elements involved in a top-down approach. In spite of the two models of listening and speaking are identified: the bottom-up and the top-down processing models. For example, bottom-up strategies are based on the language found in the discourse and include listening for details, recognition of related ideas, and word order patterns. The top-down strategies are based on the listener's background knowledge of the topic and include listening for the main idea, forecasting the outcomes, and summarize the discourse.

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EFL/ESL students,  both approaches are needed when teaching listening skills. (Nunan, 1997).