Friday, July 15, 2005

CONTINUOUS ASSESSMENT

CONTINUOUS ASSESSMENT
How can you assess the progress your students are making? Bill Bowler and Sue Parminter offer practical advice.

Some teachers are suspicious of continuous assessment. 'Doesn't it take lots of time?' they ask. Well, compared to devising regular progress tests, preparing answer keys, fixing marking schemes and marking a class's pile of tests every few weeks, not really. The way the work comes, though, is different. With continuous assessment you spend less time preparing evaluation materials outside class time, but more time evaluating in class. This is because you are assessing each student a little and often, rather than testing rarely and intensively.

'But isn't continuous assessment subjective?' ask other doubters. Well, isn't a formal written test subjective? Selecting test activities, deciding what are correct answers, and allocating marks to different areas are all subjective decisions taken by the test writer, whether it is the teacher him/herself or the author of his/her chosen coursebook.

Regular commitment

For sure, continuous assessment requires a commitment from the teacher to spend a regular amount of time not only teaching, but also evaluating students' classwork. This is not hard to organise in a classroom where there is plenty of pairwork and groupwork. While student groups are simultaneously discussing questions or performing a roleplay, the teacher can move round evaluating oral and listening skills, or noting the range and accuracy of students' vocabulary and grammar. To help the pure logistics we offer you a ready-made but adaptable chart to photocopy.

Even with more traditional whole class teaching, homework can provide a useful opportunity to evaluate each student's knowledge of grammar, vocabulary and writing skills on a regular basis, instead of relying on one end-of-course test.

Why use continuous assessment?
There are four main reasons for using continuous assessment instead of, or in addition to, formal tests:

1 Because of nerves, some students are bad at tests, though they may work well during class. Test results do not truly reflect such students' abilities, whereas continuous assessment gives a global and more accurate picture.

2 Formal tests emphasise a 'product' rather than a 'process' approach to learning. Strong students, for example, who usually perform well in tests, may become lazy, selfish and uncooperative in class because they know that their final grade depends on their test performance.

Continuous assessment emphasises 'process' rather than 'product', encouraging complacent students not to rely on a final test, but to contribute regularly in class.

We should remember that some mistakes students make in class indicate 'learning in progress'. For example, in a lesson introducing regular past tenses, a stronger student may produce an experimental, though incorrect, sentence like *I goed home at 6 o'clock yesterday. A traditional test would deduct marks for such 'intelligent' mistakes, whereas some means of rewarding this ingenuity, which is clearly a step on the road to correct English, may be made in contiuous assessment.

3 Some learning skills that we think are useful, and that we may want to encourage in our classes, are difficult to test. We cannot, for example, test the fact that a student regularly and punctually does homework, that they have a positive and enthusiastic attitude towards English, that they try hard in class, that they work well on their own, or that they co-operate well with other students in pair or group work activities. We can, however, include these things in a continuous assessment scheme.

We should of course bear in mind that some of the tasks we set in class - such as prediction before listening or reading - are not tests, but warming-up stages designed to awaken interest in a listening or reading text to follow. There are no right or wrong answers in such tasks, and we should not react to wilder guesses as if they were 'wrong'. If we do, we will discourage participatory behaviour and originality of thought in our students, and we should be actively promoting these qualities in our classes.

4 Although many teachers are convinced of the value of teaching English communicatively, 'communicative' tests are difficult to design. As a result, we use more traditional tests and so we may end up testing students on accuracy and form when we have taught them with an emphasis on fluency and meaning. When using continuous assessment, on the other hand, the way we evaluate is part of the way we teach.

Using continuous assessment when you teach communicatively means that you will naturally evaluate students' communication skills along with everything else.

Some do's

Tell students at the start of the course if you plan to use continuous assessment on its own, or in conjunction with formal testing, to calculate their final marks. If you are going to use a mixture of formal tests and continuous assessment, explain how much each component will be worth in the final mark. Will it be 50/50 or 60/40, or what?

Explain to students at the start of the course why you have decided to use continuous assessment. You may find the following explanations useful: 'Because learning a language is a slow process and I want to check your progress regularly.' 'Because what you do in every class is important, not just what you do in the final test.'

Tell students at the start of the course exactly what you will include in your continuous assessment. Possible areas are: projects and homework; participation in pairwork, groupwork and whole class work; autonomy in individual work; effort and progress; completion of extra remedial or extension tasks, whether done as homework or in self-study time in class.

For a remedial task which is easy to organise, underline students' mistakes in homework without writing in the correct version yourself. After students get their underlined homework back, they correct the underlined parts. Another time-efficient way to review homework in class is to tell each student to hand their finished work to a classmate who marks it from a blackboard answer key before they return it.
Consider using a month's continuous assessment at the start of a course instead of a formal diagnostic test. Everyone agrees that it is useful to gauge students' starting level, so that you can accurately judge the progress they have made by the end of the course. A formal diagnostic test at the start of a course can, however, be very intimidating.

Continuous assessment of a diagnostic period of classwork is therefore a useful alternative. It gives you the opportunity to gauge students' previous knowledge and abilities without having a negative initial effect on the relaxed class atmosphere that you may want to establish.


Prepare a written list of the areas in your continuous assessment scheme - with the marks for each category - to give to students at the start of the course. Tell students to keep this list. You may want to refer to it later when discussing continuous assessment grades with individual students.

With younger students, prepare a one-page description of why you are using continuous assessment - and a list of what you will look for in each class - in the students' mother tongue. Students can take this page home to show to their parents. If, later on, you need to discuss why you are using continuous assessment with parents, or to explain to them how it works, you will have a useful document to refer to. Prepare this list by referring to the teacher's assessment chart on page 18, designed for you to photocopy.

Some don'ts

Don't feel that you must assess every student in the class on everything within one lesson. With a class of thirty this would be physically impossible to achieve. Instead set yourself an assessment period of a month and aim to assess each student once on each area within that period. (With a class of thirty this means focusing on about seven students per week.) If you find this target unrealistic, set yourself a longer assessment period of six or eight weeks.

Don't feel that you must abandon formal testing. It can be useful to combine continuous assessment with formal tests to get a fuller picture of students' learning. The photocopiable chart on page 18 provides a suggestion of how to combine continuous assessment with an end-of-month test.

If you want to give greater emphasis to testing, use the same grid, but raise the value of the end-of-month test to 60% and reduce the value of the continuous assessment to 40% (or use an 80% versus 20% split if you are a more conservative teacher).

Bill Bowler and Sue Parminter have taught English as a foreign language and trained English teachers in Belarus, Britain, Canada, Hungary, Italy and Spain. They are currently living and working in Alicante, Spain, where they are writing a new secondary school English course for Oxford University Press.

CONTINUOUS ASSESSMENT GRIDOne grid each month for every ten students
CLASS: ....................................................................STARTINGDATE: ......................................................FINISHINGDATE: ......................................................
IIIIINAMES OF STUDENTS











CONTINUOSASSESSMENT60MARKS
LANGUAGE (15 marks)
GRAMMAR/FUNCTIONS


VOCABULARY
AVERAGE
SKILLS (15 marks)
READING









WRITING









LISTENING









SPEAKING









PRONUNCIATION









AVERAGE










LEARNING SKILLS (15 marks)
CLASSWORK









GROUPWORK









PAIRWORK









INDIVIDUAL WORK









EFFORT









AVERAGE










OTHER WORK (15 marks)
HOMEWORK









PROJECTS









EXTRA TASKS









AVERAGE











END OF MONTH TEST (15 marks)
WRITTEN









SPOKEN









AVERAGE










TOTAL % MARK










COMMENTS
- on progress









- on need for extension work









- on need for remedial work



Note: The end of the month test consists of a group roleplay for oral evaluation (marked for fluency, pronunciation, use of vocabulary, grammatical accuracy and participation) and a written test that covers grammar, vocabulary, listening, reading and writing (marked for spelling/punctuation, vocabulary, grammar, sentence construction and content).

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