Valdez-Pierce & O'Malley: Ch.2, Designing authentic assessment
Shohamny, E. & Inbar, O. (2006), The language assessment process: A "multiplism" perpective, (CALPER Professional Development Document 0603). University Park, PA: The Pennsylvannia State University, Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research.
These two articles beautify the notion of authentic assessment and rightfully so. If we are striving to gain access to valid and reliable data, then the test tools used should be carefully constructed so that the results display exactly what we are testing for. As previously discussed my working definition of authentic assessment is triangulation. The idea of multiplism lends itself to all and any areas in planning, implementation, teaching, and assessment. What you do after assessment furthers the variety of things that are available to you as a rater and researcher. I do agree that the standardized assessment and paper and pencils are not working for the most part in language assessment. We have learned that in language acquisition and learning, receptive skills such as reading and listening skills were the primary focus in any testing. This has evolved into further tests needed to assess productive skills such as speaking and writing. So standardized tests were not testing all the skills in ELL.
The Shohamy article was a great review on the process of constructing language assessments. All areas of language assessment should be clear and concise when planning, implementing, and analyzing ELLs. This provided me some ideas to work on in my own research. So far I am having trouble with creating questions or prompts for my pre and post tests . I am planning on collecting data through audio tapes and so far I have done a pilot test. However all my components are not yet cleared. I have my hypothesis and research questions. But where it gets foggy for me is designing some questions that would help me understand where the students are. So for example, I would like to know what the students think of themselves as Yup'ik people. I would like to see and understand where they are in that process before they begin to compare themselves to other cultures and languages. So the pretest that I want to do is more of a dialogue where the learners tell about themselves and what they think it means for them to be Yup'ik. As the year progresses I would also do a post test so that they can compare themselves to other cultures and languages they might be studying. I am still collecting data on the pretests. So far the data I have gathered does not provide me with clear and concise answers about where the learners are in terms of how they view themselves. So, I will go back to this article to see if I can find a possible solution. What I take from this article is the process in creating language assessments and my tool options. I need to revisit my research question and the tools I wanted to use to collect this. I also need to come up with working questions that would elicit the kind of responses I am looking for.
The authentic assessment chapter by Valdez was a great opener for me to fully understand the options in assessment other than standardized tests. I like how the author creates tables and charts to show examples of. What I would find useful is defining what type of assessment I would like to make. Why use this, what are the best methods and tools for achieving this information, and how would i score the data, what will the data and what should the data show. Those are some of the key questions I need to begin asking myself. I am suppose to begin using teacher observations in my class this fall, so far it seems like a tedious task and I can't seem to get started. Joan has given us some ideas on how to go about beginning this. but the hardest part is beginning this on-going teacher observations journal. Hmmm. So far in my research I will be using oral interviews, writing samples, and teacher observations. For the oral interviews I will break that into pre/post tests and oral interviews. I just need to clearly state my goals for the pre/post test and make that more clear for me and my research. I have already listed my interview questions, so that's easy. I still need to get the ball rolling on my observations.
As I read the two readings, these were on my mind; my research and my methods for gathering data. Hmmm!
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