Chapter 1: The Process of Development Assessment

Assessment includes the phases of planning, development, administration, analysis, feedback and reflection. The process of planning consist on deciding the purpose of assessing, what is the target language use, what abilities do you want to measure, etc… it is important to emphasized on the target language use domain which is the task the test taker is likely to encounter outside of the test itself, and to which we teacher want our inference about language ability to generalize. If you are assessing progress or achievement in a particular part of the syllabus, you need to map the content and main objectives of this section of the course. Remember you cannot assess everything, so you have to make choices about what to assess.

Specification is a detailed description of exactly what is being assessed and how is being done. Far classroom purposes, far simpler specifications might include:

·         A general description of the assessment

·         A list of skills to be tested and operations students should be able to do

·         The technique for assessing those skills

-      The formats and task to be used

-      The types of prompts given for each task

-      The timing for the task

·         The expected level of performance and grading criteria

 

                  

Chapter 2: Techniques for Testing

Subjective or Objective Questions?

Objective items are usually short answer- closed response items. Subjective Items usually require students to produce longer, more opened responses.

Multiple Choices Questions

Multiple choice questions are probably the most commonly used format in professionally developed test.

Common MCQ Item Violations

·         Grammatical Inconsistency:

A common mistake when developing MCQs is grammatical inconsistency between the stem and the response options. Almost always, the stem and the key are grammatically consistence, but distractors sometimes do not mesh properly with the stem.

·         Extraneous cues or clues:

Cues can occur in two places on a test: within an item or within a test. An extraneous clue that occurs within the test is one where students can find the answer to a question somewhere else on the test paper in another section of the test.

·         3 for 1 split:

This item violation occurs when three distractors are parallel and one is not. It is also called odd man out. This item varies in the degree of seriousness. It is a serious violation if the unparallel option is the key.

·         Impure Items:

Impure items are those that taste more than one thing.

·         Apples and Oranges:

An apple and oranges violation is one where two response options have no relation to the other two. This is often referred to as 2 for 2 split. There are instances where 2 for 2 splits are acceptable.

·         Subsuming  response options:

In this item violation, the intended answer and a very good distractor could both be correct.

·         Unparalleled options:

This item violation occurs when the response options are not parallel either in length or in grammatical consistency.

·         Gender bias in language:

Particular care should be taken when using vocabulary that relates to gender.

·         Sensitivity:

Materials that have a negative emotional impact on students should be avoided. Similarly, test item content that could be upsetting or shocking to students is not advisable.

·         Double answer or key:

This item violation is the most commonly made among teachers. It occurs when more than one response option is correct.

·         No answer:

This is a common item violation made by teachers.  It occurs when the author of the test item forgets to include the key  among the list of response options. This most often occurs when the item has undergone various revisions and rewrites.

·         Give away distractors:

This violations occurs when test- takers are able to improve their scores by eliminating absurd or giveaway distractors.

True/False Format

They are specialized forms of MCQ format in which there are only two possible alternatives and where students must classify their answers into one of two response categories. The common response categories are; True/False, yes/no, correct/incorrect, right/wrong, or fact/opinion.

Matching Format

Matching is an extended form of MCQ the draws on students ability to make connections among ideas, vocabulary and structure. Matching questions represent the students with two columns of information. Students must find the matches between the two columns. Items in the left hand column are called premises or stems, and items in the right hand column are called options. The advantage of matching questions over MCQs is that the student has more distractors per item. Additionally, writing items in the matching format is somewhat easier for teachers than MCQs or true/false/not given.

Cloze/Gap – Fill Items

This section discusses common subjective items used on language test: cloze and gap fill, short answer and completion items, and essay questions. Many teachers don’t distinguish between the two. In gap filling questions, we normally choose the word that we delete, whereas in cloze, we delete the words systematically.

Short Answer/ Completion Items

Short answers or sentences items ask students to answer in a few words, phrases or sentences. These items offer a number of advantages. First, they encourage students to learn and know the answer rather than just recognize it. Second, because the student must produce the answer, there is less guessing. Third, they are easy to construct. Fourth, they are especially good for checking gist, intensive understanding of a text, and who, what, where, and when content. Finally, these questions types can test higher- order thinking skills.

Essay Questions

Essay questions offer students the greatest opportunity to construct their own responses. With this question type, it is the student who decides how to approach the question, which ideas to include, how to organize these points, and which conclusions to make. Essay questions are the most useful format for assessing higher-order cognitive processes analyzing, evaluating, summarizing, and synthetizing.