Assessment Concepts and Issues

Chapter 1

Assessment Concepts and Issues

Book Name: Language Assessment principles and Classroom Practices – Second edition

Written by: H. Douglas Brown, Priyanvada Abeywickrama

Summarized : S. Mojarradi

Tests have a way of scaring students. It tenses up the students.

The fear of failure is perhaps one of the strongest negative emotions a student can experience, and the most common instrument inflicting such fear is the test.

And yet, tests seem as unavoidable as tomorrow’s sunrise in virtually all educational settings around the world. That’s important we know that the gate-keeping functions of tests – from classroom achievement tests to large –scale standardized test-has become an acceptable norm.

We have an example test in page 2 and we see it was designed to be overly difficult, to offer you no opportunity to use contextual clues, and to give you little chance of deciphering the words from your knowledge of English.Here is the bottom line that tests need not to be degrading or threatening to your students. There are some questions. Can they build a person’s confidence and become learning experiences? Can they become an integral part of a student’s ongoing classroom development? The answer is yes.

This course helps us to create more authentic, intrinsically motivating assessment procedures that are appropriate for their context and designed to offer contrastive feedback to our students.