Planning and Assessing for Inclusive Practice

Well then. I haven’t posted in more than two months. I have no excuse, really – I was having too much fun before and during the Christmas period, and I’ve just been insanely busy since then with a massive assignment and planning and assessment related to my work based experience. However, that assignment is now (largely) finished, and I can now share some of the fruits of the work. So, please read, and feed back

The assessment document is attached in ODT format. If your PC can’t read it, SHAME ON YOU! Go get OpenOffice 2!

The Assessment Tool

Family vocabulary – assessment tool

Overview

This assessment tool is a formative assessment tool (Harmer, 2004ⁱ) designed to test learners’ understanding of a series of vocabulary items related to family membership. It is indirect and discrete in that it is not an assessment of communicative ability, but rather an “[attempt to get] at what lies beneath their receptive and productive skills” (Harmer, 2007ⁱⁱ). Some of the vocabulary assessed was already known to the learners as basic vocabulary – mother, father, wife, etc… – that a Pre-entry / Entry 1 learner might be expected to know previous to the session. This assumption was borne out by the introductory activity, which elicited some basic family vocabulary present in the assessment tool. However, the outcome of the session was aimed more at family vocabulary that, while certainly useful, occurs somewhat less frequently than certain ‘core’ terms. Other objectives of the session were to review possessive forms – my, his, her, ~’s, etc…, and to review previous sessions’ objectives where we had looked at dates and the readings of years – implementing some minimum core numeracy objectives.

 

The tool itself consists of the target vocabulary – understanding of which I indicated to the learners was the criteria they were being assessed on – and a series of descriptions which fit the vocabulary:

 

“1. A male child is someone’s _______.”

 

Given that this is a vocabulary assessment, I elected to use a format somewhat similar to the gapfill activity described by Harmer (Harmer, 2007ⁱⁱⁱ). However, the activity described by Harmer is intended for the teaching of vocabulary, whereas this is an assessment activity. This lead to several important differences in approach. Primarily, I avoided prompting students as much as possible. Also included in the teaching phase of the session was a whiteboard diagram of a family tree, which included the terms included in the assessment in a visual format. I removed the text from the diagram, leaving only the pictures of the family members. There was, therefore, no external support, apart from myself, for the learners as they completed the activity.

 

Analysis

Implementing the assessment tool was not without its problems. The biggest issue with the tool was related to the low level of the students in the class. The Pre-entry class where I implemented this assessment is, I feel, my most challenging by a good margin – differentiation is a constant issue with the students, who range from very low pre-entry to high Entry 1/Entry 2. Several of the students have literacy issues, with one learner having received no formal education whatsoever. Consequently it was very difficult for her to complete the activity in the allotted time. Indeed, it was very difficult for her to comprehend the questions. To respond to this, I had to intervene to help her to understand the questions, and, despite my desire to avoid it, it was necessary for me to prompt her verbally and provide a great deal of support in the task. In place of a formal written assessment for her, I reasoned that it would be more appropriate for her to practise her writing skills, with verbal feedback and encouragement. She was capable of understanding and producing the vocabulary verbally, but I felt that it would be unfair and demotivating for her to be formally assessed on a task that was not suitable for her level.

A criticism that I would level at the tool I designed is that the questions themselves were a little convoluted. For example, question 4 asks learners to identify the name for “My father’s sister’s daughter”. Many students completed this question adequately, but others, who hadn’t fully acquired the rule governing the possessive “s”, struggled with this question. On reflection, I feel I made the mistake of “assessment by stealth”, where I was unwittingly also assessing something that I had not intended to.

 

A final point that I will take into account in later sessions is the difficulties that learners had with questions 5 and 6. Both these questions were guilty of redundancy – particularly question 5.

 

“5. My son’s grandfather is either my ___________ or my ___________”.

 

Perhaps half of the learners had trouble with this question. This indicates to me that there was an issue with the phrasing of the question, which ought to be crystal clear:

 

“In practice, reliability is enhanced by making the test instructions absolutely clear, restricting the scope for variety in the answers…” (Harmer, 2007^iv)

 

This is again an issue in question 6, which has two possible answers, yet no indication is given as to which answer is appropriate or expected – the assessment criteria were simply not clear enough in these two questions. In the future, I shall attempt to design more appropriate assessment materials that more accurately reflect the varying needs and abilities of my students, as I feel these questions unfairly penalised the less advanced learners. As I stated above, it was my desire to keep interventions to a minimum. The fact that it was necessary for me to intervene with some of the students to clarify exactly what was being asked for is a significant event that will be addressed in my reflection and action planning for the future.

 

With the more advanced Pre-entry / Entry 1 learners, the assessment was more capable of being just that. It did effectively assess which of the learners had established the correct meanings, and allowed me to see clearly which of the terms the learners had problems with, and which of the learners I need to consider more when designing and implementing lessons.

 

It is at the very least interesting, and I suggest important, to note that the learners who performed well on the assessment tended to have better pronunciation skills and could concomitantly speak faster than those whose success was more limited. Short-term memory, or working memory, seems to play an important role in learners ability to retain information over longer periods – learners who can remember longer utterances in an L2, and speak more quickly seem to remember language items better (Cook, 2001^v). This is illuminating, as perhaps the learners who performed less well in the assessment would have benefited from a planned drill in the session which focused on accuracy and speed of reproduction in all the terms included in the assessment.

 

Action Points for Future Assessment, Planning and Practice

• Be absolutely clear on what is being assessed.

• Pay greater attention to the structuring of the questions.

• Reflect on possible assessment methods that are more inclusive and suitable for a wider range of learners.

• Make sure that the assessment criteria are maintained and transparent to the learners.

• Focus more on drilling to better enable less fluent learners to retain and reproduce the items being assessed.

• Consider assessment format more closely – would this assessment have been more comprehensible as a diagram to be labelled?

 

 

References
i) Harmer, J – The Practice of English Language Teaching, 4^th Edition, Ch. 22, Pg. 379, Para. 2

ii) Harmer, J – The Practice of English Language Teaching, 4^th Edition, Ch. 22, B1, Pg.381/382

iii) Harmer, J – The Practice of English Language Teaching, 4^th Edition, Ch. 14, Pg. 240 – Fig. 2

iv) Harmer, J – The Practice of English Language Teaching, 4^th Edition, Ch. 22, Pg. 381 – Reliability

v) Cook, V – Second Language Learning and Language Teaching, 3^rd Edition, Ch. 4, Pg. 86 – The Importance of Pronunciation

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