Formative, summative, traditional, alternate are ways of assessment. Research shows that it is important to use multiple assessments to test a students ability, Walt Honey, 1991, quoted in Assessment as Learning by Lorna Earl, 2003). Conventional and alternative assessment task are the two main domain of assessment types. Conventional which is also known as traditional assessment is a component of summative assessment which will be tested to provide final feedback to stakeholders about learners achievement. It also help teachers to assign grades and determine learner's current ability.
Personally, I think believe that identifying learning needs such as educational abilities, areas of difficulties and interest are useful in establishing the appropriate type of content and in achieving desirable outcomes. Based on such information, they aim at developing a course which can enable the learners to overcome their learning difficulties. Information about learning needs can determine the type of activities or teaching methodology that learners want to have. Therefore, considering such information may increase their motivation to take the course and enhance their progress. On the other hand, if the course does not organize to engage the learners ' interest or 'based on unsuitable or irreverent samples of language and units of description will have low motivational value for the students ' (Mackay & Mountford, 1978:10).
The curriculum hence is the series of planned experiences which students must have in order to obtain these objectives (Bobbitt, 1918). The problems with measuring objectives are time consuming formation of long lists of smaller segments which sometimes are trivial competencies which leads to focusing on the parts of the curriculum rather than as a whole. The importance of overall assessment and judgment is placed aside at times. Nature of the objectives and their effective measurement is also a debatable aspect. The focus on specified outcomes may lead the learners and teachers to overlook learning that is happening as a result of the interactions just because these interactions are not specified
It is a map of how to achieve the “outputs” or desired student performance, in which appropriate learning activities and assessments are suggested to make it more likely that students achieve the desired results. (p. 6) In reality, the three key components – curriculum (knowledge, what to taught), pedagogy (how to teach) and assessment (how to assess) – are not always valued fairly (Bernstein, 1977), especially in the context of this study where the assessment inherently “washbacks” on pedagogy – or more simply put where testing influences teaching (Cheng, 1997; Andrews & Fullilove,
The article also offers sub- categories to each major category to help the reader to see which skills are used within the taxonomy. However, the author informs readers that this taxonomy may not be suitable for all students, so it is important to use the criteria provided before deciding to implement the thinking skills, as it may not always be conducive to
As defined by Bell & Cowie (2001), there are nine characteristics of formative assessment: responsiveness; source of evidence; tacit process; use of professional knowledge and experience; integral measures between teaching and learning; assessments by teacher and student; purpose; appropriateness of process; and predicaments. Vigilant observation of students progression, allows the teacher to see beyond assumptions and predictions, and provide information to better understand and support learning outcomes used to determine students understanding. Careful thought of learning assessments are grouped into four types: observation, conversation, student self-evaluation and artefacts, all of which can take form in numerous
The use of vocabulary items, complicated linguistic forms, naturalness and fluency will be enhanced if students are given time for their preparation (Skehan, 1996; Willis, 1996). This is called strategic planning phase. In this strategic planning, students can decide by themselves what to do in the task, or teachers lead them in accuracy, fluency or complexity focus (Ellis, 2003). though teacher guidance is important in notifying students what to concentrate on during preparation (Skehan, 1996), Willis (1996) claims that students tend to perform the task more eagerly when they plan the task by themselves rather than being guided by the
This means that the teacher of second language learners has to have more patience and also creativity to create interesting opportunities for learners to practise new skills without losing interest. The specific application of scaffolding and support during teaching second language learning would differ according to the ability and specific needs of the learners in each individual classroom. Walqui (2006:165) does however set out specific features that are involved and which are used when planning scaffolding and support. These features will be discussed in
Here a distinction between overt and covert error should be highlighted. For instance what sounds as acceptable utterances may contain errors. These utterances may look acceptable and grammatical at the sentence level (overtly erronueous), but unacceptable in deeper level (covertly erroneous). The third step is the description of errors, here an explanation and interpretation of learners’errors is needed. If the learner is present the teacher can ask him to express his attention in his mother tongue.
Assessment is the process of gathering data to determine students’ knowledge, skills and attitude within a certain area of a school program (Schnitzer, 1993). To become a successful entity, a school should assign high priority to implement definite procedures for frequent systematic assessments of (and for) student learning (Chappuis, 2004). Judgments made on the performance of senior school students in assessments have far reaching implications and can influence access to university and/or workforce. Therefore, it is essential that judgments are accurate, based on authentic and original assessment submissions. Educational research suggests that poor assessment design is still commonplace due to the simplicity of knowledge-based assessment