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.