Assessments

Assessment provides you, the students and/or other entities with information regarding the quantity and/or quality of knowledge or skill acquisition. Formative assessment provides this information as the teaching/learning process unfolds; thus, it is immediate and process-oriented. Summative assessment comes after the fact and mainly targets knowledge and skill acquisition as an end product.

Pre-lesson assessment can be either. Some forms of summative assessments are a placement exam (in FLE, the CAPEs from BYU), a grammar-vocabulary exam (eg. Ensemble Grammaire for 2nd year French) or a proficiency interview used to establish a learner’s entry knowledge/skill level. Formative types of assessment would be a learning style inventory, a motivation quiz based on the upcoming lesson, a quiz that is used both to see how many know how much about what is to be covered (and thus to create learning groupings or teams) and later to show students what they’ve learned, a muddiest point from a reading assignment or from the previous lesson, a 4-corners warm-up that has a ‘best’ answer (4 continents, name a country, go to the continent). Many formative assessments should have no names because you are looking for a class profile and starting point or general in-lesson feedback on the effectiveness of the teaching/learning of a lesson.
Warm-up assessments:
1. Muddiest point (from reading, last lesson)
2. A simple, inductive puzzle that showcases part of the day’s lesson (several imperfect vs. perfect verb sentences, why the diff? Done in small groups) or that works on correct syntaxe or discursive organization (putting a conversation in logical order)
3. 4-corners (eg. Where is Spain? South America Europe Africa Asia)
4. Background knowledge probe (a list of questions on topic to be covered in class—aslo serves as an advanced organizer and scaffolding—or open ended questions or 10-20 multi choices)
On-going assessments
1. During collaborative group work, the group reporter has the correct answers, for example.
2. Couple work followed by chosing various teams to provide answers and feedback
3. Instructional Conversations (NOT IRE)
4. Hands in fists (teacher asks whole class a question, views hands, asks again selecting only hands in air—avoids frustration and embarassment)
5. Learning centers with answers provided
6. Workbooks/sheets with self-corrections provided
7. Focused listing (students asked to list as many words, concepts as they can in x minutes on a single topic)
8. Memory matrix (a 2 dimensional fill-in diagram, eg. 1st 2nd 3rd conjugation verbs, romantic, impressionist, expressionist, fauvist art styles) also category grids and defining features matrices
Summative Assessments
1. Quizzes
2. Exams
3. Papers
4. Homework/Workbooks


Other types of assessments:
1. Peformance tasks—Projects (an experiment, write a story/compo/poem, oral report, produce videotape, tutor classmate/other, email with native speaker, email with other L2 learner, write questions for a test, create a menu, record weather from target capital city for x days/weeks)
2. Portfolios (best work, growth, process)
3. Journals (what one knows before, what one is learning, what they know at end; can target precise knowledge/skills, emotional/attitudinal relationship to learning, meta-thinking on subject, steps in problem solving/choosing a specific formulation/circumlocutions)
4. Concept Webs/Maps
5. Teacher observation (have a rubric sheet-eg. Correct pronunciation of /y/)