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Chapter 2. Assessment: Definition, Types, and General Principles
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Chapter 2 Assessment: Definition, Types, and General Principles This chapter will discuss the basic principles of assessment , with examples from the content areas to provide teachers with the knowledge that will enable them to design valid and reliable classroom-based or large-scale tests and critically examine existing and future state assessments. What Is Assessment? Because of the ever increasing importance placed on various statewide tests that are given to K–12 ELLs every year, many teachers tend to equate assessment with the tests they administer, whether on a large scale or in their classrooms. Test results, especially those collected through standardized instruments, certainly have critical educational consequences for students, parents, teachers, and school administrators . More and more, the scores from large-scale tests determine whether students will graduate, how much of a bonus teachers will receive, and whether schools are passing or failing in terms of performance grades. Assessment, however, is much more than tests and test scores. Bachman (1990) identified three fundamental concepts associated with the process of assessment of student performance in the social sciences: measurement, test, and evaluation. 22 Chapter 2 Assessment 23 Measurement, which Bachman (1990) considers to be synonymous with assessment, is defined as “the process of quantifying the characteristics of persons according to explicit procedures and rules” (p. 18). This definition has three clear attributes: quantification, characteristics, and procedures and rules. Quantification deals with the process of assigning numbers to performance results. Characteristics can be either physical or mental; in assessment, researchers and practitioners are interested in mental characteristics, such as aptitude, intelligence, motivation, language proficiency, and academic knowledge . Procedures and rules are the process through which the quantification of student characteristics is conducted. For ELLs, the clear understanding and application of such rules is critical. For example, in large-scale content area tests, most states do not have a separate testing instrument for ELLs, so they use the tests they administer to native English speakers, with specially designed ELL accommodations added. However , these accommodations are not given automatically to ELLs; they must be requested by the parents, the teachers, or the students. Yet if, for instance, the parents are not aware of the procedures and rules, they will not request the accommodation for their children, thus jeopardizing not only the validity of the assessment but also the future academic career of their children, because many of these tests are used for important educational decisions such as graduation , academic placement, and scholarships. If the teachers do not have a clear understanding of the procedures and rules, they might deny ELLs access to accommodations simply because they believe that a particular accommodation , such as reading the test questions aloud in English, is not allowed. The second concept Bachman (1990) discusses is test, which he defines as “a measurement instrument designed to elicit a specific sample of an individual behavior” (p. 20). For example, content area tests are designed to measure the academic standards to which students have been exposed in the classroom and determine whether the content associated with these standards has been acquired. The test will not measure all the standards associated with a particular grade level, but it will select a representative sample of those standards for assessment. Based on this measurement and, just as important, on the quality of this measurement, educators can make inferences regarding the mastery of all the standards. Evaluation, Bachman’s (1990) third concept, is the collection of “reliable and relevant information” (p. 22). The information that is collected does not have to be exclusively quantitative. Other sources of information, such as teacher-generated narratives and checklists, can help to provide a more comprehensive picture of students and their abilities. Evaluation does not have to rely exclusively on test scores, and test scores are not always evaluative. Tests should be used to motivate students to study more or to help identify gaps in their knowledge base. However, test results should be used more as a basis for educational decisions and less as a source of information. [34.230.35.103] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:36 GMT) ASSESSING ELLS IN ThE CoNTENT ArEAS 24 Assessment and English Language Learners Assessment is a combination of all formal and informal judgments and findings that occur inside and outside a classroom. Assessment consists of a multitude of points of testing and other forms of measurement. The sum of all these points creates a holistic picture of ELLs’ abilities and progress in learning English and, equally important, their mastery of...