I. PRINCIPLES OF LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT
Practicality
A test that is prohibitively expensive is impractical. A test of language proficiency that take a student five hours to complete is impractical-it consumes more time (and money) than necessary to accomplish its objective. A test that requires individual one-on-one proctoring is impractical for a group of several hundred test-takers and only a handful of examiners. A test that takes a few minutes for a student to take and several hours for an examiner to evaluate is impractical for most classroom situations. A test that can be scored only by a computer is impractical if the test takes place a thousand miles away from the nearest computer. The value and quality of a test sometimes hinge on such nitty-gritty, practical considerations.
Here’s a little horror story about practicality gone awry. An administrator of a six-week summertime short course needed the place the 50 or so students who had enrolled in the program. A quick search yielded a copy of an old English Placement Test from the University of Michigan. It had 20 listening items based on an audiotape and 80 items on grammar, vocabulary, and reading comprehension, all multiple choice format. A scoring grid accompanied the test. On the day of the test, the require number of the test booklets had been secured, a proctor had been assigned to monitor the process, and the administrator and a proctor had planned to have the scoring completed by later that afternoon so students could begin classes the next day. Sound simple, right? Wrong.
The students arrived, test booklets were distributed, and direction were given. The proctor started the tape. Soon students began to look puzzled. By the time the tenth item played, everyone looked bewildered. Finally, the proctor checked a test booklets and was horrified to discover that the wrong tape was playing; it was a tape for another form of the same test! Now what? She decided to randomly select a short passage from a textbook that was in the room and give the student dictation. The students responded reasonably well. The next 80 non-tape-based items proceeded without incident, and the students handed in their score sheets and dictation papers.
When the red-face administrator and the proctor got together later the score the tests, they faced the problem of how to score the dictation-a more subjective process than some other forms of assessment. After a lengthy exchange, the two established a point system, but after the first few papers had been scored, it was clear that the point system needed revision. That meant going back to the first papers that make sure the new system was followed.
The two faculty members had barely begun to score the 80 multiple-choice items when students began returning to the office to receive their placements. Students were told to come back the next morning for the results. Later that evening, having combined dictation score and 80 multiple-choice scores, the two frustrated examiners finally arrived at placement for all students. It’s easy to see what when wrong here. While the listening comprehension section of the test was apparently highly practical, the administrator had failed to check the materials ahead of time. Then, they established scoring procedure that did not fit into the time constraints. In classroom based testing, time is almost always a crucial practicality factor for busy teachers with a few hours in the day.
Reliability
A reliable test is consistent and dependable. If you give the same test to the same student or matched students on two different occasions, the test should yield similar results. The issue of reliability of the test may best be addressed by considering a number of factors that may contribute to the unreliability of a test. Consider the following possibilities: fluctuations in the student, in scoring, in test administration, and in the test itself.
Student-Related-Reliability
The most common learner-related issue in reliability is caused by temporary illness, fatigue, a “bad day”, anxiety, and other physical or psychological factors, which may make an “observed” score deviate from one’s true score. Also include in this category are such factors as a test-taker’s “test-wideness” or strategies for efficient test taking.
Rater Reliability
Human error, subjectivity, and bias may enter into the scoring process. Inter-rater reliability occur when two or more scorers yield inconsistent scores of the same test, possibly for lack of attention to scoring criteria, inexperience, inattention or ever preconceived biases. In the story above about the placement test, the initial scoring plan for the dictation was found to be unreliable-that is, the two scorers were not applying the same standards.
Rater reliability issues are not limited to contact where two or more scorers are involved. Intra-rater reliability is a common occurrence for classroom teachers because of unclear scorer criteria, fatigue, and bias toward particular “good” and “bad” students or simple carelessness. When I am faced with up to 40 tests to grade in only a week, I know that the standards I apply-however-subliminally-to the first few tests will be different from those I apply to the last few. I may be “easier” or “harder” on those first few papers or I may get tired, and the result may be an inconsistent evaluation across all tests. One solution to such intra-rater unreliability is to read through about half of tests before rendering any final scorer or grades, then to recycle back through the whole set of tests to ensure an even-handed judgment. In tests of writing skill, rater reliability is particularly hard to achieve since writing proficiency involves numerous traits that are difficult to define. The careful specification of an analytical scoring instrument, however can increase rater reliability (J. D. Brown, 1991).
Test Administration Reliability
Unreliability may also result from the conditions in which the test is administered. I once witnessed the administration of the test of oral comprehension in which a tape recorded played items for comprehension, but because of street noise outside the building, student sitting next to window could not hear the tape accurately. This was the clear case of unreliability caused by the condition of the tests administration. Other sources of unreliability are found in photocopying variations, the amount of light in different of the room, variations in temperature, and even the condition of desk and chair.
Test Reliability
Sometime the nature of the test itself can cause measurement errors. If a test is too long, test-takers may become fatigued by the time they reach the later items and hastily respond incorrectly. Timed test may discriminate against students who do not perform well on a test with the time limit. We all know people (and you may be included in this category) who “know” the course material perfectly but who are adversely affected by the presence of a clock ticking away. Poorly written test items (that are ambiguous or that have more than one correct answer) may be a further source of test unreliability.
Validity
By far the most complex criterion of an effective test-and arguably the most important principle-is validity, “the extent to which inferences made from assessment results are appropriate, meaningful, and useful in terms of the purpose of the assessment” (Ground, 1998, p. 226). A valid test of reading ability actually measure reading ability-not 20-20 vision, nor previous knowledge in a subject, nor some other variable of questionable relevance. To measure writing ability, one might ask student to write as many words as they can in 15 minutes, then simply count the words for the final score. Such a test would be easy to administer (practical), and the scoring quite dependable (reliable). But it would not constitute a valid test of writing ability without some consideration of comprehensibility, rhetorical discourse element, and the organization of ideas, among other factors.
How is the validity of a test established? There is no final, absolute measure of validity, but several different kinds of evidence may be invoked in support. In some cases, it may be appropriate to examine the extent to which a test calls for performance that matches that of the course or unit of study being tested. In other cases, we may be concerned with how well a test determines whether or not students have reached an established set of goals or level of competence. Statistical correlation with other related but independent measure is another widely accepted form of evidence. Other concerns about a test’s validity may focus on the consequences-beyond measuring the criteria themselves-of a test, or even on the test-taker’s perception of validity. We will look at these five types of evidence below.
Content-Relation Evidence
If a test actually samples the subject matter about which conclusions are to be drawn, and if it requires the test-taker to perform the behavior that is being measured, it can claim content related evidence of validity, often popularly referred to as content validity (e.g.,. Mousasi, 2002; Hughes, 2003). You can usually identity content-relation evidence observationally if you can clearly define the achievement that you are measuring. A test of tennis competency that asks someone to run a 100-yard dash obviously lacks content validity. If you are trying to assess a person’s ability to speak a second language in a conversational setting, asking the learner to answer paper-and-pencil multiple-choice questions requiring grammatical judgment does not achieve content validity. A test that requires the learners actually to speak within some sort of authentic context does. And if a course has perhaps ten objectives but only two are covered in a test, then content validity suffers.
Consider the following quiz on English article for a high beginner level of a conversation class (listening and speaking) for English learners.
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English article quiz
The students had a unit on zoo animals and had engaged in some open discussions and group work in which they had practiced articles, all in listening and speaking modes of performance. In that quiz uses a familiar setting and focuses of previously practiced language forms, it is somewhat content valid. The fact that it was administered in written form, however, and required students to read the passage and write their responses make it quite low in content validity for a listening/speaking class.
There are a few cases of highly specialized and sophisticated testing instrument that may have questionable content-related evidence of validity. It is possible to contend, for example, that the standard language proficiency tests, with their context reduced, academically oriented language and limited stretches of discourse, lack content validity since do not require the full spectrum of communicative performance on the part of the learner (see Bachman, 1990, for a full discussion). There is good reasoning behind such criticism; nevertheless, what such proficiency tests lack in content-related evidence they may gain in other form of evidence, not to mention practicality and reliability.
Another way of understanding content validity is to consider the difference between direct and indirect testing. Direct testing involves the test-taker in actually performing the target task. • Criterion-Related Evidence
A second of evidence of the validity of a test may be found in what is called criterion-related evidence, also referred to as criterion-related validity, or the extent to which the “criterion” of the test has actually been reached. You will recall that in Chapter I it was noted that most classroom-based assessment with teacher-designed tests fits the concept of criterion-referenced assessment. In such tests, specified classroom objectives are measured, and implied predetermined levels of performance are expected to be reached (80 percent is considered a minimal passing grade).
Construct-Related Evidence
A third kind of evidence that can support validity, but one that does not play as large a role classroom teachers, is construct-related validity, commonly referred to as construct validity. A construct is any theory, hypothesis, or model that attempts to explain observed phenomena in our universe of perceptions. Constructs may or may not be directly or empirically measured-their verification often requires inferential data.
Consequential Validity
As well as the above three widely accepted forms of evidence that may be introduced to support the validity of an assessment, two other categories may be of some interest and utility in your own quest for validating classroom test. Mesick (1989), Grounlund (1998), McNamara (2000), and Brindley (2001), among others, underscore the potential importance of the consequences of using an assessment. Consequential validity encompasses all the consequences of a test, including such considerations as its accuracy in measuring intended criteria, its impact on the preparation of test-takers, its effect on the learner, and the (intended and unintended) social consequences of a test’s interpretation and use.
Face Validity
An important facet of consequential validity is the extent to which “students view the assessment as fair, relevant, and useful for improving learning” (Gronlund, 1998, p. 210), or what is popularly known as face validity. “Face validity refers to the degree to which a test looks right, and appears to measure the knowledge or abilities it claims to measure, based on the subjective judgment of the examines who take it, the administrative personnel who decode on its use, and other psychometrically unsophisticated observers” (Mousavi, 2002, p. 244).
Authenticity
A fourth major principle of language testing is authenticity, a concept that is a little slippery to define, especially within the art and science of evaluating and designing tests. Bachman and Palmer (1996, p. 23) define authenticity as “the degree of correspondence of the characteristics of a given language test task to the features of a target language task,” and then suggest an agenda for identifying those target language tasks and for transforming them into valid test items.
Washback
A facet of consequential validity, discussed above, is “the effect of testing on teaching and learning” (Hughes, 2003, p. 1), otherwise known among language-testing specialists as washback. In large-scale assessment, washback generally refers to the effects the test have on instruction in terms of how students prepare for the test.
“Cram” course and “teaching to the best” are examples of such washback. Another form of washback that occurs more in classroom assessment is the information that “washes back” to students in the form of useful diagnoses of strengths and weaknesses. Washback also includes the effects of an assessment on teaching and learning prior to the assessment itself, that is, on preparation for the assessment is by nature more likely to have built-in washback effects because the teacher is usually providing interactive feedback. Formal tests can also have positive washback, but they provide no washback if the students receive a simple letter grade or a single overall numerical score.
The challenge to teachers is to create classroom tests that serve as learning devices through which washback is an achieved. Students’ incorrect responses can become windows of insight into further work. Their correct responses need to be praised, especially when they represent accomplishments in a student’s inter language. Teacher can suggest strategies for success as part of their “coaching” role. Washback enhances a number of basic principles of language acquisition: intrinsic motivation, autonomy, self-confidence, language ego, inter language and strategic investment, among others.
One way to enhance washback to comment generously and specifically on test performance. Many overworked teachers return tests to students with a single letter grade or numerical and consider their job done. In reality, letter grades and numerical scores give absolutely no information of intrinsic interest to student. Grades and scores reduce a mountain of linguistic and cognitive performance data to an absurd molehill. At best, they give a relative indication of a formulaic judgment of performance as compared to others in the class which fosters competitive, not cooperative, learning.
With this in mind, when you return a written test or a data sheet from an oral production test, consider giving more than a number, grade, or phrase as your feedback. Even if your evaluation is not a neat little paragraph appended to the test, you can respond to as many details throughout the test as time will permit. Give praise for strengths -the “good stuff”- as well as constructive criticism of weaknesses. Give strategic hints on how a student might improve certain elements of performance. In other words, take some time to make the test performance an intrinsically motivating experience from which a student will gain a sense of accomplishment and challenge.
A little bit of washback may also help students through a specification of the numerical scores on the various subsections of the test. A subsection on verb tenses, for example, that yields a relatively low score may serve the diagnostic purpose of showing the student an area of challenge.
Another viewpoint on washback is achieved by a quick consideration of differences between formative and summative tests. Formative tests, by definition, provide washback in the form of information to the learner on progress toward goals. But teachers might be tempted to feel that summative tests, which provide assessment at the end of a course or program, do not need to offer much in the way of washback. Such an attitude in unfortunate because the end of every language course or program is always the beginning of further pursuits, more learning, more goals, and more challenges to face. Even a final examination in a course should carry with it some means for giving washback to students.
In my courses I never give a final examination as the last scheduled classroom session. I always administer a final exam in order to return them to students during the last class. At this time, the students receive scores, grades, and comments on their work, and I spend some of the class session addressing material on which the students were not completely clear. My summative assessment is thereby enhanced by some beneficial washback that is usually not expected of final examinations.
Finally, washback also implies that students have ready access to you to discuss the feedback and evaluation you have given. While you almost certainly have known teachers with whom you wouldn’t dare argue about a grade, an interactive, cooperative, collaborative classroom nevertheless can promote an atmosphere of dialogue between students and teachers regarding evaluative judgments. For learning to continue, students need to have a chance to feedback on your feedback, to seek clarification of any issues that are furry, and to set new and appropriate goals for themselves for the days and weeks ahead.
II. APPLYING PRINCIPLES TO THE EVALUATION OF CLASSROOM TEST
The five principles of practicality, reliability, validity, authenticity, and washback go a long way toward providing useful guidelines for both evaluating an existing assessment procedure and designing one on your own. Quizzes, tests, exams, and standardized proficiency tests can be scrutinized through these five lenses.
Are there other principles that should be invoked in evaluating and designing assessment? The answer, of course, is yes. Language assessment is an extraordinarily broad discipline with many branches, interest areas, and issue. The process of designing effective assessment instruments is far too complex to be reduced to five principles. Good test construction, for example, is governed by research-based rules of test preparation, sampling of tasks, item design and construction, scoring responses, ethical standard, and so on. But the five principles cited here serve as an excellent foundation on which to evaluate existing instruments and to build your own.
The questions that follow here, indexed by the five principles, will help you evaluate existing tests for your own classroom. It is important for you to remember, however, that the sequence of these questions does not imply a priority order. Validity, for example, is certainly the most significant cardinal principle of assessment evaluation. Practically may be a secondary issue in classroom testing. Or, for a particular test, you may need to place authenticity as your primary consideration. When all is said and done, however, if validity is not substantiated, all other considerations may be rendered useless.
1. Are the test procedures practical?
Practically is determined by the teacher’s (and the students’) time constraints, costs, and administrative details, and to some extent by what occurs before and after the test. To determine whether a test is practical for you needs you may want to use the checklist below
Practically checklist
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§ 1. Are administrative details clearly established before the test?
§ 2. Can students complete the test reasonably within the set time frame?
§ 3. Can the test be administered smoothly, without procedural “glitches”?
§ 4. Are all materials and equipment ready?
§ 5. Is the cost of the test within budgeted limits?
§ 6. is the scoring/evaluation system feasible in the teacher’s time frame?
§ 7. Are methods for reporting results determined in advance?
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As this checklist suggests, after your account for the administrative details of giving a test, you need to think about the practicality of your plans scoring the test. In teacher’s busy lives, times, often emerges as the most important factor, one that overrides other consideration in evaluating an assessment. If you need to tailor test to fit your own time frame, as teachers frequently do, you need to accomplish this without damaging the test’s validity and washback. Teachers should, for example, avoid the temptation to offer only quickly scored multiple-choice selection items that may be neither appropriate nor well-designed. Everyone knows teachers secretly hate to grade tests (almost as much as students hate to take them!) and will do almost anything to get through that task as quickly and effortlessly as possible. Yet good teaching almost always implies an investment of the teacher’s time I giving feedback-comments and suggestions-to students on their tests.
2. Is the test reliable?
Reliability applies to both the test and the teacher, and at least four sources of unreliability must be guarded against, as noted in the section of this chapter. Test and test administration reliability can be achieved by making sure that all students receive the same quality of input, whether written or auditory. Part of achieving test reliability deepens on the physical context-making sure, for example, that
· Every student has a cleanly photocopied test sheet,
· Sound amplification is clearly audible to everyone in the room,
· Video input is equally visible to all,
· Lighting, temperature, extraneous noise, and other classroom conditions are equal (and optimal) for all students, and
· Objective scoring procedures leave little debate about correctness of an answer.
Rater reliability, another common issue in assessments, may be more difficult, perhaps because we too often overlook this as an issue. Since classroom test rarely involve two scores, inter-rater reliability is seldom an issue. Instead, intra-rater reliability is of constant concern to teachers: what happens to our fallible concentration and stamina over the period of time during which we are evaluating a test? Teachers need to find ways to maintain their concentration and stamina over the time it takes to score assessment. In open-ended response tests, this issue is a paramount importance. It is easy to let mentally established standards erode over the hours you require to evaluate the test.
Intra-rater reliability for open-ended responses may be enhanced by the following guidelines:
· Use consistent sets of criteria for a correct response.
· Give uniform attention to those sets throughout the evaluation time.
· Read through tests at least twice to check for your consistency.
· If you have made “mid-stream” modifications of what you consider as a correct response, go back and apply the same standards to all.
· Avoid fatigue by reading the tests in several sittings, especially if the time requirement is a matter of several hours.
3. Does the procedure demonstrate content validity?
The major source of validity in a classroom test is content validity: the extent to which the assessment requires students to perform tasks that were included in the previous classroom lesson and that directly represent the objective of the unit on which the assessment is based. If you have been teaching an English language class to fifth graders who have been reading, summarizing, and responding to short passages, and if your assessment is based on this work, then to be content valid, the test needs to include performance in those skills.
There are two steps to evaluating the content validity of a classroom test.
1. Are classroom objectives identified and appropriately framed? Underlying every good classroom test are the objectives of the lesson, module, or unit of course in question. So the first measure of an effective classroom test is the identification of objectives. Sometimes this is easier said than done. Too often teachers work through lessons day after day with little or no cognizance of the objectives they seek to fulfill. Or perhaps those objectives are so poorly framed that determining whether or not they were accomplished is impossible. Consider the following objectives for lessons, all of which appeared on lesson plans designed by students in teacher preparation programs:
a. Students should be able to demonstrate some reading comprehension.
b. To practice vocabulary in context.
c. Students will have fun through a relaxed activity and thus enjoy their learning.
d. To give students a drill on the /I/ - /I/ contrast.
e. Students will produce yes/no questions with final rising intonation.
Only the last objective is framed in a form that lends itself to assessment. In (a), the modal should is ambiguous and the expected performance is not stated. In (b), everyone can fulfill the act of “practicing”; no standards are started or implied. For obvious reasons, (c) cannot be assessed. And (d) is really just a teacher’s note on the type of activity to be used.
Objective (e), on the other hand, includes a performance verb and a specificlinguistic target. By specifying acceptable and unacceptable levels of performance, the goal can be tested. An appropriate test would elicit an adequate number of samples of student performance, have a clearly framed set of standards for evaluating the performance, and provide some sort of feedback to the student.
2. Are lesson objectives represented in the form of test specifications? The next content-validity issue that can be applied to a classroom test centers on the concept of test specifications. Don’t let this word scare you. It simply means that a test should have a structure that follow logically from the lesson or unit you are testing. Many tests have a design that
· Divides them into a number of sections (corresponding, perhaps, to the objectives that are being assessed),
· Offers students a variety of item types, and
· Gives an appropriated relative weight to each section.
Some tests, of course, do not lend themselves to this kind of structure. A test in a course in academic writing at the university level might justifiably consists of an in class written essay on given topic-only one “item” and one response, in a manner of speaking. But in this case the specs (specifications) would be embedded in the prompt itself and in the scoring or evaluation rubric used to grade it and give feedback. We will return to the concept of test specs in the next chapter.
The content validity of an existing classroom test should be apparent in how the objectives of the unit being tested are represented in the form of the content of items, clusters of items, and item types. Do you clearly perceive the performance of test-takers as reflective of the classroom objectives? If so, and you can argue this, content validity has probably been achieved.
Is the Procedure Face Valid and “Biased for Best”?
This question integrates the concept of face validity with the importance of structuring an assessment procedure to elicit the optimal performance of the student. Students will generally judge a test to be face valid if
· Directions are clear;
· The structure of the test is organized logically,
· Its difficulty level is appropriately pitched,
· The test has no “surprises,” and
· Timing is appropriate
A phrase that has come to be associated with face validity is “biased for best,” term that goes a little beyond how the students views the test to a degree of strategic involvement on the part of student and teacher in preparing for, setting up and following up on the test itself. According to Swain (1984), to give an assessment procedure that is “biased for best,” a teacher.
· Offers students appropriate review and preparation for the test
· Suggests strategies that will be beneficial, and
· Structure the test so that the best students will be modestly challenged and the weaker students will not be overwhelmed
It’s easy for teachers to forget how challenging some test can be, and so a well-planned testing experience will include some strategic suggestions on how students might optimize their performance. In evaluating a classroom test, consider the extent to which before, during and after-test options are fulfilled.
Test Taking Strategies
Before the Test
1. Give students all the information you can about the test: Exactly what will the test cover? Which topics will be the most important? What kind of items will be on it? How long will it be?
2. Encourage students to do a systematic review of material. For example, they should skim the textbook and other material, outline major points write down example.
3. Give them practice test or exercises, if available.
4. Facilitate formation of a study group, if possible.
5. Caution students to get a good night’s rest before the test.
6. Remind students to get to the classroom early.
During the Test
1. After the test is distributed, tell students to look over the whole test quickly in order to get a good grasp of its different parts.
2. Remind them to mentally figure out how much time they will need for each part.
3. Advise them to concentrate as carefully as possible.
4. Warn students a few minutes before the end of the class period so that they can finish on time, proofread their answer, and catch careless errors.
After the Test
1. When you return the test, include feedback on specific things the students did well, what he or she did not do well, and if possible, the reasons for your comments.
2. Advice students to pay careful attention in class to whatever you say about the test result.
3. Encourage questions from students.
4. Advise students to pay special attention in the future to points on which they are weak.
Keep in mind that what comes before and after the test also contributes to its face validity. Good class preparation will give students a comfort level with the test, and good feedback washback will allow them to learn from it.
Are the Test Tasks as Authentic as Possible?
Evaluate the extent to which a test is authentic by asking the following questions:
· Is the language in the test as natural as possible?
· Are items as contextualized as possible rather than isolated?
· Are topics and situations interesting, enjoyable, and/or humorous?
· Is some thematic organization provided, such as through a story line or episode?
· Do tasks represent, or closely approximate, real-world tasks?
Consider the following two excerpts from test, and the concept of authenticity may become a little clearer.
Multiple-Choice Tasks-Contextualized
“Going To”
1. What ________ this weekend?
a. You are going to do
b. Are going to do
c. You going to do
2. I’m not sure _________ anything special?
a. Are going to do
b. You are going to do
c. Is going to do
3. My friend Melissa and I _______ a party. Would you like to come?
a. Am going to
b. Are going to go to
c. Go to
4. I’d love to!
a. What’s it going to be?
b. Who’s going to be?
c. Where’s it going to be?
5. It is __________ to be at Ruth’s house.
a. go
b. going
c. going to
Multiple Choice Tasks Decontextualized
1. There are three countries I would like to visit. One it Italy.
a. The other is New Zealand and other is Nepal
b. The others are New Zealand and Nepal.
c. Others are New Zealand and Nepal.
2. When I was twelve years old, I used _______ every day.
a. swimming
b. artistic
c. artist
3. When Mr. Brown designs a website, he always creates it _________
a. Artistically
b. Artistic
c. Artist
4. Since the beginning of the year, I ________ at Millennium Industries.
a. am working
b. had been working
c. have been working
5. When Mona bore her leg, she asked her husband ________ her to work.
a. to drive
b. driving
c. drive
The sequence of items in the contextualized tasks achieves a modicum of authenticity by contextualizing all the items in a story line. The conversation is one that might occur in the real world, even if with a little less formality. The sequence of items in the decontextualized tasks takes the test-taker into five different topic areas with no context for any. Each sentences is likely to be written or spoken in the real world, but not in that sequence. Given the constraints of a multiple-choice format, on a measure of authenticity I would say the first excerpt is “good” and the second excerpt is only “fair”
Does the Test Offer Beneficial Washback to the Learner?
The design of an effective test should point the way to beneficial washback. A test that achieves content validity demonstrates relevance to the curriculum in question and thereby sets the stage for washback. When test items represent the various objectives of a unit, and/or when sections of a test clearly focus on major topics of the unit, classroom test can serve in a diagnostic capacity even if they aren’t specifically labeled as such.
Other evidence of washback may be less visible from an examination of the test itself. Here again, what happens before and after that test is critical. Preparation time before the test can contribute to washback since the learner is reviewing and focusing in a potentially broader way on the objectives in question. By spending classroom time after the test reviewing the content, students discover their areas of strength and weakness. Teachers can raise the washback potential by asking students to use test result as a guide to setting goals for their future effort. The key is to play down the “Whew, I’m glad that’s over” feeling that students are likely to have, and play up the learning that can now take place from their knowledge of the results.
Some of the “alternatives” in assessment referred to in Chapter 1 may also enhance washback from tests. Self-assessment may sometimes be an appropriate way to challenge students to discover their own mistakes. This can be particularly effective for writing performance: once the pressure of assessment has come and gone, students may be able to look back on their written to simply listening to the teacher tell everyone what they got right and wrong and why. Journal writing may offer students a specific place to record their feelings, what they learned, and their resolutions for future effort.
The five basic principles of language assessment were expanded here into six essential questions you might ask yourself about an assessment. As you use the principles and the guidelines to evaluate various forms of test and procedures, be sure to allow each one of the five to take on greater or lesser importance, depending on the context. In large scale standardized testing, for example, practicality is usually more important than washback but the reverse may be true of a number of classroom test. Validity is of course always the final arbiter. And remember, too, that these principles, important as they are, are not the only considerations in evaluating or making an effective test. Leave some space for other factors to enter in.
In the next chapter, the focus is on h ow to design a test. The same five principles underlie test construction as well as test evaluation, along with some new facets that will expand your ability to apply principles to the practicalities of language assessment in your own classroom.
By. 2nd group
Catrine Mei Windri
Cindy Aprilia
Santi Novitasari
Novri Karyati
Junitrin
