Portfolios and Conferences

Portfolios and conferences are innovate and valuable methods of collecting data for evaluation. They offer a lot of opportunities to use language with teachers in way that seldom occur during regular class time. When they are used interactively can give students a sense of involvement in, control over, and enthusiasm for learning. But it must be taken into account that a special care should be taken by the teachers to ensure that these activities are used in student-centered, interactive ways; otherwise, the unique benefits of these methods will not be realized. 

Portfolio is a purposeful collection of student’s work that demonstrates to students and others their efforts, progress, and achievements in given areas. They can provide many benefits such as: A holistic view of student learning, opportunities for collaborative assessment, opportunities to use metalanguage to talk about language among others. In addition to this, it also promotes: student involvement is assessment, responsibility for self-assessment, collaborative haring classrooms, among others.

In the beginning, it is vital that teachers negotiate with students how you will jointly implement portfolios in your classroom. Portfolios are useful since they can keep samples of writing, lists of books, books reports, and so on. Although reviewing portfolios is time consuming, it helps you since they are more organized.

Conferences in comparison are often used to review the contents of portfolios. While portfolios whose primary benefits are related to assessment of achievement, conferences are advantageous for understanding the process, strategies, and approaches students use in the performance of school work. Then, the authors of this paper (Genesee & Upshur) do not recommend using conferences for grading purposes because grading generally focuses on learning outcomes or achievement, whereas the primary focus of conferences is process. I agree with them since there exists other methods of assessing language achievement for grading such as portfolios and tests which are more objective.

Beyond Tests: Alternative in Assessment (Brown & Hudson)

It is well-known that everyone wants a test for everything; for this reason, tests have acquired a great importance nowadays. First of all we have to know that tests are one of number types of assessment. Long time ago a new term was proposed, that was “alternative assessment” such as journal, portfolios, observations, self-assessment, peer-assessment, it was discovered that these assessments gave a power of balance to the classroom. Later, the authors of this paper (Brown and Hudson) discover that these assessments implies something new that may be exempt from the requirements, so he proposes alternatives in assessment instead.

There are some of the alternatives in assessments that are different from formal tests. In contrast, standardized tests are designed to minimize time and money on part of designer and test-taker and alternative assessments are time consuming instead.

On the other hand, we also have to talk about performance-based assessment; it implies productive observable skills since the tasks students perform are consistent with course goals and curriculum.  

Portfolios are one of the most common alternative assessments especially within a framework of communicative language teaching. They include essays, reports, and journals, among others.

Journals are very common written assessment; they include diaries, language-learning logs, among others.

Observations are based on nonverbal behavior; perception, feelings, etc.

Self and peer assessment derives their theoretical justification from a number of well-established principles of second language acquisition.

 

A framework for evaluation

A framework for evaluation

There is no precise rule for how a student must be in order to be advanced since we are without precise decision rules, so we need a strategy for making decisions. Then, the main aims of this paper are to present such strategy to illustrate how it could work in the classroom, and to discuss the formulation of plans for effective evaluation.

v  The context for classroom-based evaluation.

Evaluation is a process that results in decisions about instruction, students, or both.

Now the author will present some examples of how decisions are made in the classroom:

v  A strategy for classroom-based evaluation

Decisions that result from classroom-based evaluation are arrived at by making comparisons between various components of instruction and the larger instructional context, and then taking action to reduce mismatches between the components so that the outcome is achieved. Another way of viewing classroom-based evaluation requires that you look for potential problems and decide on actions to resolve them. Evaluation can even begin with a comparison of instructional objectives and incoming students’ needs, goals, previous learning experiences, and present level.

v  Planning evaluation

Evaluation should be an integral part of planning each lesson or units as well as general planning at the beginning of the school year or course. When planning evaluation the following questions should be taken into account:

Who will use the results of assessment and for what purposes?

The results of assessment can be used by different people for different purposes.

What Will I assess?

All second language teachers will be concerned with their students’ achievement.

When will I assess?

If it is referred to formative evaluation, they need to assess their students’ performance all the time, even when the explicit focus of attention is not on language. And if it refers to summative evaluation, assessment at the end of the year is required by the school district or program director in order to assign grades.

How will I assess?

How will I record the results of my assessment?

The author suggests five components of a comprehensive evaluation plan:

v  A list of people who need assessment information

v  A description of the kinds of information they need

v  A description of assessment activities

v  A Schedule for conducting assessment

v  A description of record-keeping methods to be used

Testing, Assessing, and Teaching (H.Douglas Brown)

Second Reading

Testing, Assessing, and Teaching.

I found this reading very interesting and important as well since we as future teacher must know how, when, and why not only test, but also assessing our students. The first thing that we have to know is that there exist differences between testing and assessing. Test is a method which measure somebody’s abilities and knowledge and assessing is an ongoing process.

On the other hand, it is very important to know that all those processes have been used since long time ago, to know the history and the approaches behind them; give us an idea of how assessing and testing really work. We as future teacher should have into account many things at the moment of testing and assessing students. A good assessment can change somebody’s perspective or thought. So, we have to be careful, tactful, and very intelligent.

In addition to this, testing and assessing students is something that go beyond that; it is not only give a student a sheet where he has to answer questions randomly; or talk to him and say “ it is god, or bad” It is talk to the students, support them, advice them if what they are doing is correctly, if it the best way of doing, etc.

Teaching Speaking