How to assess young learners

“Assessment is about several things at once …It is about reporting on students’ achievements and about teaching them better through expressing to them more clearly the goals of our curricula. It is about measuring student learning; it is about diagnosing misunderstandings in order to help students to learn more effectively. It concerns the quality of the teaching as well as the quality of the learning” (Ramsden 117).

 Focus on the matter of assessing young learner, it is clear and in this stage we cannot use only summative assessment "Young learners are notoriously poor test takers. The younger the child being evaluated, assessed, or tested, the more errors are made…[and] the greater the risk of assigning false labels to them" (Katz 1997:1). Traditional classroom testing procedures can cause children a great deal of anxiety that affects their language learning as well as their self-image (Smith 1996).

Therefore, children need to learn and be evaluated in an anxiety-reduced, if not anxiety-free, environment. This can be achieved if children perceive assessment as an integral component of the learning/teaching process rather than an independent process whose purpose is to pass judgment on their abilities in relation to their classmates. I think that it is more useful if we apply formative assessment to encourage students to develop the activities in a better way.

I have been taught for about a year in an English institute for kids in Bucaramanga and one of my biggest challenges has been to answer the question about how I should assess those kids. Based on my experience as a teacher I can say that just the matter of teaching them is difficult because her ages, because their motivation depends a lot on the teacher, and because it is very difficult to maintain their attention in the different activities that we plan.

 Children are very sensitive, each of them is a unique person and all of them need to be praised, encouraged, they need to feel appreciation by the teacher, we cannot treat them as adults because their development is totally different, they react differently to some situation. In this way we as teachers need to have a lot of knowledge about children development.

When a was at high school and I was learning about Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and Erik Eriksson’s psychosocial theory, I always thought that is was a waste of time but now I realize that we need to focus our practice in those theories if want to success in our profession; we cannot do things just because, we need a support that help as to understand ways of learning, behaviors, learning difficulties and so on. Sometimes we just plan our classes without thinking in those theories but intrinsically we apply those in our practices.

As a conclusion I can say that the power of assessment is enormous, it help us to improve our pedagogical practices, and also to know better our students. Assessment becomes a diagnostic tool that provides feedback to the learner and the teacher about the suitability of the curriculum and instructional materials, the effectiveness of the teaching methods, and the strengths and weaknesses of the students. Furthermore, it helps demonstrate to young learners that they are making progress in their linguistic development, which can boost motivation. This encourages students to do more and the teacher to work on refining the process of learning rather than its product.

REFERENCES

Katz, L. 1997. A developmental approach to assessment of young children.

ERIC Digest. ED407172. Champaign, IL: ERIC Clearinghouse on

Elementary and Early Childhood Education.

Ramsden, Paul. Learning to Teach in Higher Education. London: Routlege, 2003.

Smith, K. 1996. Assessing and testing young learners: Can we? Should we?

In Entry points: Papers from a symposium of the research, testing, and

young learners special interest groups, ed. D. Allen. Kent, England:

IATEFL.

THE USE OF PORTFOLIOS O GOOD WAY TO ASSESS

When I started taking assessment class I did not think that it would be one of the subjects in which I would learn too much about my career. For many teachers assessment is not an important issue, especially for those that are a little bit older. For then assessment and evaluation are the same and both are related to testing. Now I can say that I have a lot of tools or at list I know a lot of information about assessment and in this text I would like to discuss about the use of portfolios in the classroom.

Using portfolios give as a big picture about what are the students are doing. A portfolio is an organized collection of student work designed to represent students' efforts and academic achievements over a period of time. Portfolios are a powerful assessment tool that provide a record of accomplishments and encourage students to reflect on their progress. Students typically take responsibility for organizing their portfolio and selecting the most appropriate content, depending on the purpose of the portfolio assessment task.

There are some things that we as teachers need to take into account, for instance establishing the purpose of the portfolio, it is very important otherwise the learner can fell lost doing something that does not have sense.

Another important thing  that we cannot leave out is the stage in which the teacher gives feedback; of course it is time consuming bur learners need to know about their process, as it is a new way to assess some of them need scaffolding and guidance.

 Students may not engage with portfolios if they are not formally assessed. You may need to consider creative ways of integrating these assessment activities into your curriculum so that students know that they are valued.

So now we have a clear view about the use of portfolios in the classroom, the idea is to put  into practice all this knowledge and start using authentic way to assess our students.

Assessing listening, is that difficult?

Assessing listening, is that difficult?

Some days before when I thought about listening and some ways to asses it in a classroom anything came to my mind, of course it was because I had not read about the topic and I had a different view about listening. When I was in first semester I was very bad at listening, I did not understand anything and my listening exams were terrible. Now I understand that everything is a process and that a good listener is the result of a process in which the four skills are engage. We cannot pretend that our students have a good development in listening if we do not enhance the other skills.

We as teachers need to know that assessing listening is not a matter of decoding information and put it into something visible, it is process of understanding, analyzing making inferences and so on. We have to Measure comprehension (not hearing, spelling, prior knowledge of a topic or reading long multiple-choice questions).

Now we have a lot of ideas and meaningful assessment task taking into account each kind of listening.

The lack of information is not a excuse to asses listening in the correct way.

Please, remember that:

   

assesment conception

Reading all this articles about assessment, testing, evaluation, I realize that when we were at secondary school these words did not have any sense; they were just the words to blame for our bad scores, or simply these words made our teacher more detestable.

At that time we only knew about terrible exams which used to be the ones to demonstrate if we were good or not in certain subjects. Teachers never gave as feedback about anything; exams said almost everything about the performance of a student.

I think that feedback is an important aspect in education, students need to know about their performances in order to increase the quality of their processes. 

But nowadays in my position as a teacher I must to say that assessment is amazing, and that the process of a student is more important that their scores, assessment give as the tools to improve processes, give solutions to problems and to make the students aware of their own stiles of learning.

It is a shame to say that there are still teachers who do not appreciate the power of assessment as a one of the most important processes in education. They just apply some exams to fulfill a requirement but where are their journals?  Where are their reflections? Where are their proposals to try to solve problems?

These are some of the advantages of assessment for both teachers and students.

Teachers can:

• Identify skills and conceptual understandings that need reinforcement;
• Identify and respond to misconceptions about, and misapplications of, content knowledge and processes; and
• Monitor student progress.

Students can:

• Revisit and revise work based on known criteria;
• Use models of successful work (exemplars) as a “target” for their own learning; and
• Self-monitor their progress.

Assesment vs Evaluation

Assessment and evaluation are two very important concepts in any process that need improvement, and if we talk about education it is like a requirement to have cleared these concepts, I used to think that assessment and evaluation were the same and that they were related to grading, but these terms are quite different.

 Assessment is, most likely, not a new concept for us; however, in most previous assessment situations, we were probably the one being tested. As we move into your teaching position, we will assume the responsibilities of an evaluator and an assessor. we will be required to determine how well our students are learning, gauge their performance, and measure the appropriateness of the content and the effectiveness of the methods and techniques utilized in our classroom.

When we assess our individual students, we gather information about their level of performance or achievement. Effective assessment is a continuous process. It's not simply something that's done at the conclusion of a unit of study or at the end of a lesson. Effective assessment and evaluation are integrated into all aspects of the curriculum, providing both teachers and students with relevant and useful data to gauge progress and determine the effectiveness of materials and procedures.

As it is shown in the picture above, assessment and evaluation although are highly related, have different purposes. The first one is more focused on measuring a performance, work product or skill in order to offer feedback and provide directives for improving future performance, and evaluation on the other hand is more focused on making judgment or determination concerning the quality of a performance.

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