So I was writing my essay for my Testing and Assessment class from FUNIBER‘s MA in TEFL, and the assignment was to create a test and then analyze it using the materials we’d read throughout the unit. I had just given my students this Volunteering Test, with lots of authentic input from the United Nations Volunteers website, and so I asked for permission to use it, and got it.
When I started analyzing it though, I realized it wasn’t that good of a test, and I couldn’t help but wondering, how often do we as teachers ask ourselves the right questions when it comes to how, why and what we test. In my case at least, I work for public schools in Argentina, and although I appreciate the freedom I have about choosing textbooks, materials, etc., it is also true that I am completely alone, and if I make a mistake, then there’s nobody there to let me know. Of course, I have colleagues, and I can always ask them for advice, but there is nothing organized for us. I keep thinking how many times I probably go through the same situation in which I think something is great (a lesson, an activity, a test) and then when I really think about it, it’s not that great.
As you can probably see, I have a lot of questions, but no answers. At FAAPI this year in Bahia Blanca, Mariano Quinterno and Gustavo Paz talked about how we need to have a critical approach to our teaching practice, and I couldn’t agree more. They talked about the need to ask ourselves lots of questions about what we do as teachers in the classroom, and how we organize our teaching in general. They based their workshop on Paulo Freire‘s theories as well as many other eye-opening thinkers, and so this post intends to make me think out loud about what I do in my classroom when it comes to testing, and to make a conscious effort to ask myself the difficult questions that help me re-assess my teaching practice and become a better teacher.
To finish, here’s a clip from my assessment materials, which I think is useful to start asking ourselves some questions about testing:
4.10 Communicative checklist for tests
West offers a “Communicative Checklist” for assessing the communicativeness of a language test. Affirmative answers to the following questions serve to indicate how communicative a test really is:
1. Does the item assess meaning/content as well as form?
2. Does the item test integrative rather than discrete-point language?
3. Are the input texts authentic, or authentic-like?
4. Does the task give the learner a real-world purpose?
5. Does the task replicate a real-world task?
6. Do the speaking/writing tasks require interaction?
7. Do tasks involve information/opinion/reasoning gaps?
8. Is fluency tested as well as accuracy?
9. Are the learners’ output texts authentic?
10. Do the learners know their own roles and those of the audience?
11. Are these roles they can identify with the real world?
12. Is the situation plausible or necessary in the real world?
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