Although I love the enthusiasm that many students show towards English, I often have the aching suspicion that they dont truly find meaning in studying English. Sure, if you ask students why they are studying English they will robotically answer that it will help them get a job, they want to travel to an English speaking country, or because its important. Most of these answers and opinions are inherited from others and just repeated. The more I think about it the more I realize that many students just go through English repeating, memorizing and maybe having fun along the way but arent really aware of what theyve learned or how it may have changed them. I blame the current test emphasized assessment strategy.
Every term around test time, teachers start drilling students with review, students stress with the oncoming thought of tests and schools get ready for the one-day assessment of several months of learning. Then, once the results come out, teachers, students, and school administrators alike celebrate or feel shamed depending on success or failure. Then assessment is done, nothing you can do about it, move on to more content. Is this really the message we want to send? This message is that the final single-medium demonstration of knowledge is the single most important event in learning and that the process of learning is meaningless. Moreover, its difficult to find personal meaning in English when English performance is based on filling in some blanks on a piece of paper or repeating some memorized phrases then forgetting about them the next day.
To make English more personally meaningful there needs to be a shift towards valuing the process of learning. This can be achieved with a more balanced approached to assessment. Balanced assessment means using a variety of assessment methods including: diagnostic, formative and summative assessments.
Diagnostic assessment occurs at the beginning of the teaching/learning cycle. This type of assessment will provide the teacher with an understanding of the prior knowledge and skills a student brings to a unit, as well as the strengths and specific learning needs of an individual or groups of students in relation to the expectations that will be taught. The teacher can use this information to determine where time and resources are needed to focus on student weaknesses or misconceptions and where concepts can be covered quickly or extended in difficulty for student strengths. As a student it also provides a base measure of their knowledge and understanding so that they can compare it to later measures and reflect on their learning. Diagnostic assessments can be a written or oral test or project that focuses on what should be known or what will be learned.
Formative assessments, in contrast, are administered frequently by teachers during an instructional unit to assess student learning as it happens. Used effectively, formative assessment provides information that helps the teacher adjust instruction to improve learning. The teacher can determine which students are struggling or which concepts students are struggling with. At the same time a teacher can use this information to improve teaching practice. Students benefit from this assessment by gaining insight into what they are learning and their learning progression. Formative assessments take many forms. For example, it can be journal reflections, open-ended questions, quizzes, mini-projects, laboratories, worksheets, self or peer evaluations, discussions, or interviews.
Summative assessmentsadministered at the end of a unit, semester, or yearcannot provide teachers with timely information on how to teach differently or what content to re-teach to move students toward mastery. Large-scale summative assessments may be useful for ranking and comparing schools, districts, or programs, and they may identify content areas in which particular groups of students are struggling. Their results may be useful in helping schools adjust the instructional program for the future. However, these standardized tests are not a good assessment choice for addressing students' current academic needs. It should be noted that summative assessments are not only tests, but also projects, writing assessments or presentations.
Extensive research worldwide on diagnostic and formative assessment has shown a significant positive effect on student learning. But for these assessments to be effective, teachers must continually check students' learning and be willing to modify instruction to meet the student needs identified by the data. Both practices may require teacher change.
To make English more meaningful at your school, you must integrate all types of assessment into your planning time. Although assessment can be improvised it will likely suffer from a lot of subjectivity and not be balanced. The best assessments are planned and timed to enhance students probability of success. A good balance would be to have at least 1 diagnostic assessment before a unit starts, several formative assessments throughout the lesson that focus on key concepts, and a culminating summative assessment at the end of the unit. Using such assessments techniques will help students realize what they are learning, how well they are learning and better prepare them for the inevitable standardized tests. It also helps to foster critical-thinking and self-confidence in students as they learn about themselves. Most importantly, we will teach students that the process of learning is just as important, if not more, than the proof of learning. If you think back to your schooling at compare all the test and scores your received versus the epiphanies you had about learning Im sure youll agree that it was the journey, not the destination ,that was most important in the end.
