Diagnostic Assessment Essay

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Abstract

Assessing reading comprehension is an important part of teaching a second or foreign language which should receive enough attention to make learners able to improve their reading comprehension and cope with the problems they encounter while taking reading tests. Consequently, the present study focused on investigating the effect of diagnostic assessments as an important assessment technique on two types of reading comprehension tasks, selective and productive, to help EFL learners improve their reading comprehension performance. For this purpose, a Nelson proficiency test was administered to 117 EFL learners, from whom 90 learners whose scores were one standard deviation above and below the mean score were chosen. The participants …show more content…

After diagnosing the problem and finding its reason, it is the time to do something to solve it. To make sure the prediction has an effect on the learning process, the best way is to exchange the information about the problem. This information is called feedback which is an important factor in learning. There are a lot of different sources of feedback such as the teacher, a grade on a certificate, a peer’s gesture, and so forth (Alderson, et al., 2015).
According to Jang and Wagner (2014), diagnostic feedback refers to the information provided to the learners to make them able to reflect on their performance with the purpose of receiving appropriate remedy.
Alderson, et al. (2015), Brookhart (2008), Jang and Wagner (2014), and Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick (2006) proposed three elements for an effective feedback that both the teacher and the learners must take into account to influence the learning. They can be summarized as feed up, feed back, and feed forward. The first one is about the goals the learners and teachers are seeking, the second one refers to the progress which is being made toward the goals, and the last one describes the activities which are helpful in the way of making progress.
Using standard diagnostic tests is a very good idea to find the source of the learners’ errors but the number of the tests developed

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