Practical Assessments * Research and Evaluation

Synopsis

By Licda. Guiselle Weelkly

Designing Scoring Rubrics for Your Classroom 

are a scoring scale consisting of a set of criteria that describe what expectations are being assessed/evaluated and descriptions of levels of quality used to evaluate students work or to guide students to desired performance levels.

There are two types of rubrics:

1. Holistic Rubric  requires the teacher to score the overall process or product as a whole without judging the component parts separately. This type of rubric is probably more appropiate when performance tasks requires students to create some sort of response and where there is no definitive correct answer.  It is also a quicker scoring process than the use of analytic rubrics.

 

2.  Analytic Rubric    is when the teacher scores separately, individual parts of the product or performance first,  then sums the individual scores to obtain a total score.  Usually it is used when there may be one or two acceptable responses and creativity is not an essential feature of the student's  responses. 

The degree of feedback offered to students-and teachers- is significant when taking into account the analytic rubric.

Five Reasons Why Analytical Rubrics Are Helpful

1. Differentiated Instruction

As in the example above, the rubric can serve as diagnostic and formative assessment to enable the teacher to differentiate instruction. Charting these assessments on whole class recording matrices can help the teacher group students for efficient instruction, such as mini-lessons, or assign individual worksheet practice to help students master and apply writing skills.

2. Progress Monitoring

Because analytical rubrics isolate discreet writing tasks that are components of different writing assignments, performance level data can be charted on recording matrix from one writing assignment to the next. These data can be analyzed by class and individual performance and serve as progress monitoring.

3. Student Involvement

Analytical rubrics provide road maps for student writers to follow. Specific expectations are set at the beginning of the writing assignment. As in the example above, students can complete peer response checklists on each writing task and then use the revision checklist to respond to the teacher’s diagnostic assessment and/or the peer response.

4. Flexibility

Analytical rubrics allow the teacher to assess parts of a student writing assignment and not have to grade each writing task. Examples: A teacher might choose to assign an on-demand timed writing and then diagnostically assess and record levels of performance on variety of evidence. A teacher might choose to have a reader or parent assess and record levels of performance on spelling, punctuation, and citation format. A teacher might choose to work with colleagues in a read-a-round, with each colleague assessing a different set of writing tasks.

5. Language of Instruction and the Writing Process

Analytical rubrics provide the language of instruction for writers, peers, parents, and teachers to discuss each writing task throughout the steps of the writing process. These specific writing tasks help students and teachers plan, draft, revise, edit, and publish their writing.

Let's   take our students, step by step,  they will be glad for the HELP.

Basic Reading & Writing Techniques - Part 1: Alphabet Study

The Advantages of Rubrics

Reaction Paper 

By

Licda. Guiselle Weelkly W.

PART ONE

Teachers are interested in evaluating their students'  performance which are based on the sum of a full range of criteria rather than single numerical score,  that is what we know as a scoring guide or rubric.

Rubrics can be:

1.  A way of enhancing the quality of direct instruction.
2. A working guide for students and teachers which can be handed out before the assignment begin so that they( students) can know exactly what is expected from them.
3. An authentic assessment  tool used  to evaluate students'  works.

Why use rubrics?

Many experts believe that rubrics improve students's  end products and increase learning as well.  Two major reasons for using rubrics are:

• They are guides students can use to build on current knowledge.
• They should be part of a planning time,  not as an additional time commitment to teacher's  preparation.

Some activities rubrics can be used for are:

1. Reviewing.

2.Reconceptualizing.

3.Revising the same concept but from a different angle in order to improve the understanding of the student's lesson.

Advantages of using rubrics:

* Teachers can increase the quality of their direct instruction by providing focus, emphasis,  and attention to particular details as a model for students.

* Students have explicit guidelines regarding teacher's  expextations.

*Students can use it as a tool to develop their abilities.

*Teachers can reuse rubrics for various activities.

PART  TWO

Anybody involved in teaching will gladly embrace the opportunity they have in learning how to develop rubrics for their assessments.

To get started is important to take in account the following:

• Determine the concepts to be taught.
• Choose the criteria to be evaluated.
• Develop a grid.
• Share the rubrics with students before they being writing.
• Evaluate the end product.
• Place it on a bulletin board or distribute it by hand out.
• It should be visible at all times.

PART  THREE

Analytic  vs   Holistic Rubrics

There is a clear difference between both:

• Holistic Rubric assess students work as a whole.
• Analytic Rubric identify and assess components of a finished product.

Rubric Reminders:

1.  Neither the analytic nor the holistic rubric is better than the other one.

2. Consider your students and grader(s) when deciding each type to use.

3. For modeling,  present to your students examples in order to help them  with their performance.

PART FOUR

How to Weigh Rubrics?

First of all, the  weighted rubric is an analytic rubric in whic certain concepts are judged more heavily than others.  It clearly communicates to the students and their parents the important parts that they should focus on in an activity.  It also focuses attention on specific aspects of a project permiting the students to be aware of what is being taught,  while provinding meaningful context to support their entire experience.

Chapter # 6: Assessing Speaking

Synopsis

By Licda. Guiselle Weelkly

Chapter 6
"Assessing  Speaking" 

 Speaking is as we know is an important mean of communication in actually all English programs.

According to the teacher,  the curricular program and other aspects, valid assessment should reflect the course objectives.  

Some ways teacher uses to test this skill are:

• Simulation of real-life situations in which students are engage in conversations.
• Develop class discussions and debates.

According to Heaton ( 1995, p.88) the skill of speaking is " an extremely difficult skill to test..."  The greatest challenges are  resource requirements and reliability,  including the perceived subjectivity in grading.

Teachers most of the time after analizing:

1. Lack of time.
2. Number of students.
3. Lack of available tests.
4. Administrative difficulties.

 Reach to the conclusion that they are not even going to think about assessing speaking.

It is important dispate the different situations this assessment might go through, to do the  correct evaluation because, for instance,  in communicative language teaching, speaking is a prominent component of the language curriculum, and on the other side,  English is  consider a global language, it is said that a large percentage of the world's language learners study English in order to develop proficiency in speaking.

According to Canale and Swain ( 1980) there are four competencies underlying speaking ability and they are:

1. Grammatical Competence.
2. Discourse Competence.
3. Sociolinguistic Competence.
4. Strategic Competence.

There are some categories  of oral skills worthy of looking at, they are:

1. Routine Skills ( exchanging information or interacting)
2. Improvisational Skills.

Some special issues in speaking assessment  can be:

1. Develop assessments that test more than one student at a time, giving each student the opportunity to speak individually.
2.  Test formally only few times during a course but use continuos assessment of students during normal classroom activities.

An important consideration when designing speaking assessments is to decide what type of speaking samples to collect from student.  These considerations are divided into:

• Formal Speaking Assessment Techniques which carries a framework for speaking tests following these stages:

1.  Warm up.
2. Level Check.
3. Probe.
4. Wind down .
5. Picture Cue.
6. Prepared Monologue.
7. Role play.
8. Information gap activity.

   

Classroom Speaking Assessment Techniques, they include:

1. Oral presentations.
2. Debate on a controversial topic.
3. Reading aloud.
4. Retelling stories.
5. Verbal Essays.
6. Extemporaneous Speaking.

 General Rubric for Assessing Speaking

Many teachers prefer to use a more general rubric for speaking tasks such as the ones listed above.

Adminsitrative Issues for Assessing Speaking

There are a number of issues that definately take place when assessing students, whether individually or as a group,  therefore, it is recommended to follow this tip:

Select two or three students each class period  and focus on their speaking during class participation. According to Coombe( 2007)  if you do this regularly,  you will be able to track students' progress throughout  the course in a fairly stress-free environment.

 

Chapter # 5: Assessing Listening

Synopsis

By Licda. Guiselle Weelkly

Chapter 5
"Assessing Listening"

The assessment of listening abilities is one of the least understood and least developed, yet one of the most important areas of language testing and assessment ( Anderson and Bachman, 2001, p.x.) says Coombe( 2007).  

Everyone knows how important it is to assess the listening skills of our students, nevertheless, sometimes it is difficult to do so because the listening process is internal and not subject to direct study and observation. Now adays,  listening is considered as an active process and a great emphasii is placed on it.

Models of Listening

It is very essential to undertstand the nature of listening and for that reason there are two models in literature that have been identified:

1.  Bottom- Up Processing: Here comprehension occurs when the listener successfully decodes the spoken text. In other words, students take in a word, decode it, and link it with other words to form sentences.

1.  Top-down Listening: Here the listener is directly involved with the constructing meaning from imput. The student uses background knowledge of the context and situation to make sense of what is heard. The recommendation is to assess and teach both.

Approaches to Listening Assessment

Researchers in the educational field had discover that there are three major approachers to  the assessment of listening abilities and they are:

•  Discrete-Point Approach: this approach broke listening into component elements and assessed them separately.
• Integrative Approach: this approach  attempt to assess a learner's  capacity to use many bits( of knowledge of language) at the same time.
• Communicative Approach :the listener here must be able to comprehend the message and then use it in context and there "question formats should be authentic in nature".

Other generalities about assessing listening have to do with:

1. General versus Academic Listening
2. Considerations in Designing Listening Tasks: Here you could analize the background knowledge, Test Content, Texts, Vocabulary, Test Structure, Formats, Item Writing, Timing, Skill Contamination.

Techniques for Assessing Listening Comprehension 

There are different techiniques that are essential to develop good listening comprehension, some are:

• Phonemic Discrimination
• Paraphrase Recognition
• Objective Formats It includes short answer questions, close,dictation.
• Information transfer tasks
• Note - Taking
• Listening Test Delivery
• Recording Voiceovers
• Scoring