Assignment 5, Summary Designing classroom Language Tests

Summary

DESIGNING CLASSROOM LANGUAGE TESTS

There are several types of tests, namely:
A. Language Aptitude Tests
B. Proficiency Tests
C. Placement Tests
D. Diagnostic Tests
E. Achievement Tests

A. Language Aptitude Tests
A language aptitude test is designed to measure capacity or general ability to learn a foreign language and ultimate success in that undertaking. Language aptitude tests are ostensibly designed to apply to the classroom learning of any language.

B. Proficiency Tests
A proficiency test is not limited to anyone course, curriculum, or single skill in the language rather, it tests overall ability. Proficiency tests have traditionally consisted of standardized multiple-choice items on grammar, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and aural comprehension.

Proficiency tests are almost always summative and norm-referenced. They provide results in the form of a single score (or at best two or three subscores, one for each section of a test), which is a sufficient result for the gate-keeping role they play of accepting or denying someone passage into the next stage of a journey.

And because they measure performance against a norm, with equated scores and percentile ranks taking on paramount importance, they are usually not equipped to provide diagnostic feedback. A typical example of a standardized proficiency test is the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL produced by the Educational Testing Service. The TOEFL is used by more than a thousand institutions of higher education in the United States as an indicator of a prospective student's ability to undertake academic work in an English-speaking milieu.

C. Placement tests
Certain proficiency tests can act in the role of placement tests, the purpose of which is to place a student into a particular level or section of a language curriculum or school. A placement test usually, but not always, includes a sampling of the material to be covered in the various courses in a curriculum a student's performance on the test should indicate the point at which the student will find material neither too easy nor too difficult but appropriately challenging.

The English as a Second Language Placement Test (ESLP1) at San Francisco State University has three parts. In Part I, students read a short articre and then write a summary essay. In Part II, students write a composition in response to an article. Part III is multiple choice students read an essay and identify grammar errors in it. The maximum time allowed for the test is three hours. The ultimate objective of a placement test is, of course, to correctly place a student into a. course or level.

D. Diagnostik tests
A diagnostic test is designed to diagnose specified aspects of a language. A test in pronunciation, for example, might diagnose the phonological features of English that are difficult for learners and should therefore become part of a curriculum. Usually, such tests offer a checklist of features for the administrator (often the teacher) to use in pinpointing difficulties. A writing diagnostic would elicit a writing sample from students that would allow the teacher to identify those rhetorical and linguistic features on which the course needed to focus special attention.

E. Achievement Tests
An achievement test is related directly to classroom lessons, units, or even a total curriculum. Achievement tests are (or should be) limited to particular material addressed in a curriculum within a particular time frame and are offered after a course haS focused on the objectives in question. Achievement tests can also serve the diagnostic role of indicating what a student needs to continue to work on in the future, but the primary role of an achievement test is to determine whether course objectives have been met-and appropriate knowledge and skills acquired-by the of a period of instruction. The specifications for an achievement test should be determined by :

• the objectives of the lesson, unit, or course being assessed,
• the relative importance (or 'weight) aSSigned to each objective,
• the tasks employed in classroom lessons during the unit of time,
• practicality issues, such as the tinle frame for the test and turnaround time, and
• the extent to which the test structure lends itself to formative washback.

1. SOME PRACCTICAL STEPS TO TEST CONSTRUCTION
You may think that every test you devise must be a wonderfully innovative instrument that will garner the accolades of your colleagues and the admiration of your students. Not so. First, new and innovative testing formats take a lot of effort to design and a long time to refine through trial and error. Second, traditional testing  techniques can, with a little creativity, conform to the spirit of an interactive, communicative language curriculum.
Your best tack as a new teacher is to work within the guidelines of accepted, known, traditional testing techniques. Slowly, with experience, you can get bolder in your attempts. In that spirit, then, let us consider some practical steps in constructing classroom tests.

a. Assessing Clear, Unambiguous Objectives
In addition to knowing the purpose of the test you're creating, you need to know as specifically as possible what it is you want to test. Sometimes teachers give tests simply because it's Friday of the third week of the course, and after hasty glances at the chapter(s) covered during those three weeks, they dash off some test items so that students will have something to do during the class. This is no way to approach a test. Instead, begin by taking a careful look at everything that you think your students should "know" or be able to "do," based on the material that the students are responsible for. In other words, examine the objectives for the unit you are testing.

b. Drawing Up Test Specifications
Test specifications for classroom use can be a simple and practical outline of your test. In the unit discussed above, your specifications will simply comprise (a) a broad outline of the test, (b) what skills you will test, and (c) what the items will look like.

c. Devising Test Tasks
As you devise your test items, consider such factors as how students will perceive them (face validity), the extent to which authentic language and contexts are present, potential difficulty caused by cultural schemata, the length of the listening stimuli, how well a story line comes across, how things like the cloze testing format will work, and other practicalities.

d. Designing Mulltiple-Choice Test Items
In the sample achievement test above, two of the five components (both of the listening sections) specified a multiple-choice format for items. This was a bold step to take. Multiple choice items, which may appear to be the Simplest kind of item to construct, are extremely difficult to design correctly. Hughes (2003, pp. 76-78)
Cautions against a number of weaknesses of multiple-choice items:
• The technique tests only recognition knowledge.
• Guessing may  have a considerable  effect on test scores.
• The technique severely restricts what can be tested.
• It is very difficult to write successful items.
• Washback ,may be harmful.
• Cheating may be facilitated.


Since there will be occasions when multiple-choice items are appropriate, consider the following four guidelines for designing multiple choice items for classroom-based and large-scale situations (adapted from Gronlund, 1998, pp.60-75, and J. D. Brown, 1996, pp. 54-57).
1. Design each item to measure a specific objective.
2. State both stem and options as simply and directly as possible.
3. Make certain that the intended answer is clearly the only correct one.
4. Use item indices to accept, discard, or revise items. (Itemfacility, Item discrimination, Distractor efficiency).

2. SCORING, GRADING, AND GIVING FEEDBACK

a. Scoring
As you design a classroom test, you must consider how the test will be scored and graded. Your scoring plan reflects the relative weight that you place on each section and items in each section. The integrated-skills class that we have been using as an example focuses on listening and speaking skills with some attention to reading and writing. Three of your nine objectives target reading and writing skills.

Because oral production is a driving force in your overall objectives, you devide to place more weight on the speaking (oral interview) section than on the other three sections Five minutes is actually time to spend in a one-on-one situation with a student, and some significant information can be extracted from such a session. You therefore designate 49 percent of the grade to the oral interview. You consider the listening and reading sections to be equally important, but each of them, especiaiIy in this multiple choice format, is of less consequence than the oral interview. So you give each of 20 percent weight.

That leaves 20 percent for the writing section , which seems about right to you given the time and focus on writing in this unit of the course. Your next task is to assign scoring for each item. This may take a little numerical common sense, but it doesn't require a degree in math. To make matters simple, you decide to have a 100-point test in which.

b. Grading
Your first thought might be that assigning grades to student performance on this test would be easy: just give an "A" for 90-100 percent, a "B" for 80-89 percent, and so on. Not so fast! Grading is such a thorny issue that all of Chapter 11 is devoted to the topic. How you assign letter grades to this test is a product of :

• the country, culture, and context of this English classroom,
• institutional expectations (most of them unwritten),
• explicit and impliCit definitions of grades that you have set forth,
• the relationship you have established with this class, and
• student expectations that have been engendered in previous tests and quizzes in this class.
For the time being, then, we will set aside issues that deal with grading this test in particular, in favor of the comprehensive treatment of grading in Chapter 11.

c. Giving Feedback
A section on scoring and grading would not be complete without some consideration of the forms in which you will offer feedback to your students, feedback that you want to become beneficial washback, the example test that we have been refer­ring to here which is not unusual in the universe of possible formats for periodic classroom tests-consider the multitude of options.You might choose to return the test to the student with one of, or a combination of, any of the possibilities below:

1. a letter grade
2. a total score
3. four subscores (speaking, listening, reading, writing)
4. for the listening and reading sections
a.an indication of correct/incorrect responses
b. marginal comments
5. for the oral interview
a. scores for each element being rated
b. a checklist of areas needing work
c. oral feedback after the interview
d. a post-interview conference to go over the results
6. on the essay
a. scores for each element being rated
b. a checklist of areas ne~ding work
c. marginal and end-of-essay comments, suggestions
d. a post-test conference to go over work
e. a self-assessment
7. on all or selected parts of the test, peer checking of results
8. a whole-class discussion of results of the test
9. individual conferences with each student -toreview the whole test

Washback is achieved when students can, through the testing experience identify their areas of success and challenge when a test becomes a learning experience it achieves washback.option 3  gives a student a chance to see the relative strength of each skill area and so becomes minimally useful.Options 4, 5, and 6 represent the kind of response a teacher can give (stimulating astudent self assessment) that approaches maximum washback.

References :
Brown, H. Douglas. Language Assessment: Principles and Classroom Practices. Longman.