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АКТУАЛЬНЫЕ ВОПРОСЫ ДОШКОЛЬНОГО И ШКОЛЬНОГО ЯЗЫКОВОГО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ
УДК 37:81'243 И. С. Денисенко
аспирант каф. лингводидактики МГЛУ e-mail: ilya.denisenko@gmail.com
АУТЕНТИЧНАЯ ОЦЕНКА УРОВНЯ ВЛАДЕНИЯ ИНОСТРАННЫМ ЯЗЫКОМ УЧАЩИХСЯ СРЕДНЕЙ ШКОЛЫ
В статье представлены основные характеристики аутентичной оценки как альтернативной оценки уровня обученности учащихся средних общеобразовательных учреждений, изложены основные виды и формы, критерии и требования к применению такой оценки учителями и разработчиками, шкала для оценивания обучаемых, приведено сравнение аутентичной оценки с тестовой формой оценки.
Ключевые слова: аутентичная оценка; деятельностная оценка; альтернативная оценка; открытый вопрос.
Denisenko I. S.
Postgraduate, Foreign Language Teaching Department, MSLU e-mail: ilya.denisenko@gmail.com
AUTHENTIC ASSESSMENT OF LANGUAGE SKILLS IN SCHOOL
The article defines key features of Authentic Assessment as alternative to traditional forms of assessment evaluating language skills schools: core principles and forms, criteria and requirements to teachers, developers and a scale for students.
Key words: authentic assessment; performance assessment; alternative assessment; open-ended questions.
Over the recent years the system of education in Russia has changed dramatically. The new educational standards tend to bring serious changes into the classroom and curriculum. Teachers are being retrained, schools are growing in size as a result of merging, the State exam is developing from year to year in order to meet the needs of the state and universities. Thus getting prepared for the State exam in English is still challenging, which is mostly about the format of the exam and not the subject itself.
Looking at the structure of the exam we learn that the body of the exam consists of multiply-choice tests. Besides, learners are supposed to demonstrate good skills in listening, reading. There is also a written part with two tasks: an informal letter and an essay on the topic set. and writing. The speaking part that has been absent so far is expected to appear in the year 2015. Academic society still has a very vague idea of what it will look like.
This article will look at an alternative way of assessing learners, and not only during exams. The article aims to show how authentic assessment could be used in class and become one of the powerful tools in assessing learners. We believe that applying the so called authentic assessment system in schools will have a positive impact on their academic achievement as well as on their learning motivation.
Authentic assessment (AA) is known and has been studied by western academic society since the early nineties. This topic has been researched by many methodologists such as: G. Wiggins, J. Mueller, D. Newman, J. Michael O'Malley, D. Collison, John N. Bergan, S. Chappius, E. Badger, C. Chapman and many others. The term 'authentic assessment' is already used by some Russian researches (A. Asmolov , A. Kondakov, D. Grigorev, O. Churakova and others). AA can be used in any academic subject, but it seems to be an effective tool in assessing English language skills.
There are a number of definitions of authentic assessment and all of them have much sense. AA is often compared with standard language tests. We believe that AA of educational achievement measures the student's actual performance in a subject area. While standardized multiple-choice tests rather measure test-taking skills.
Authentic assessment is also called 'performance assessment', 'appropriate assessment', 'alternative assessment' or 'direct" assessment' [8]. Authentic evaluation includes a wide variety of techniques: written products, solutions to problems, experiments, exhibitions, performances, portfolios of work and teacher observations, checklists and inventories, and cooperative group projects. These assessments may evaluate regular classroom activity or take the form of tests or special projects. Authentic assessment is an evaluation process that involves multiple forms of performance measurement reflecting the student's learning, achievement, motivation, and attitudes on instructionally-relevant activities [10].
Authentic evaluation indicates what the teacher wants the student to know and be able to do. For this purpose the instructions should be
appropriate to the student's age and level of learning and the subject being measured, and should be useful to both teacher and students [4].
By performance assessment they mean any form of assessment in which the student constructs a response orally or in writing. Portfolio assessment is a systematic collection of student work that is analyzed to show progress over time with regard to instructional objectives. Student self-assessment offers opportunities for the student to self-regulate learning, and the responsibility of appraising his or her own progress. Integrated assessment refers to evaluation of multiple skills or assessment of language and content within the same activity. A written science report, for example, might include assessment of language skills, information selection and use skills, and reasoning skills as well as scientific content knowledge [9].
Other terms help to define the meaning of authentic assessment. In a broader sense, assessment is any systematic approach for collecting information on student learning and performance, usually based on different sources of evidence. Authentic assessment involves approaches to finding out what students know or can do other than through the use of multiple-choice testing. AA also provides students with a wider spectrum of student performance. This wider spectrum should include real-life learning situations and meaningful problems of a complex nature not solved with simple answers selected from a menu of choices [7].
J. Muller goes on to compare traditional assessment (which is a test of any kind) with authentic assessment [3].
Traditional ^ Authentic
Selecting a Response ^ Performing a Task
Contrived ^ Real-life
Recall / Recognition ^ Construction / Application
Teacher-structured ^ Student-structured
Indirect Evidence ^ Direct Evidence
Selecting a Response to Performing a Task
On traditional assessments, students are typically given several choices (e.g., a, b, c or d; true or false) and asked to select the right answer. In contrast, authentic assessments ask students to demonstrate understanding by performing a more complex task, usually representative of more meaningful application.
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Contrived to Real-life
Outside school people are seldom asked to select from four alternatives to indicate their proficiency at something. Tests offer these contrived means of assessment to increase the number of times you can be asked to demonstrate proficiency in a short period of time. More commonly in life, as in authentic assessments, we are asked to demonstrate proficiency by doing something.
Recall /Recognition of Knowledge to Construction /
Application of Knowledge
Well-designed traditional assessments (i.e., tests and quizzes) can effectively determine whether or not students have acquired a body of knowledge. Tests can serve as a nice complement to authentic assessments in a teacher's assessment portfolio tools set. Furthermore, we are often asked to recall or recognize facts and ideas and propositions in life, so tests are somewhat authentic in that sense. However, the demonstration of recall and recognition on tests is typically much less revealing about what we really know and can do than when we are asked to construct a product or performance out of facts, ideas and propositions. Authentic assessments often ask students to analyze, synthesize and apply what they have learned in a substantial manner, and students create new meaning in the process as well.
Teacher-structured to Student-structured
When completing a traditional assessment, what a student can and will demonstrate has been carefully structured by the person who developed the test. A student's attention will understandably be focused on and limited to what is on the test. In contrast, authentic assessments allow more student choice and construction in determining what is presented as evidence of proficiency. Even when students cannot choose their own topics or formats, there are usually multiple acceptable routes towards constructing a product or performance. Obviously, assessments more carefully controlled by the teachers offer advantages and disadvantages. Similarly, more student-structured tasks have strengths and weaknesses that must be considered when choosing and designing an assessment.
Indirect Evidence to Direct Evidence
Even if a multiple-choice question asks a student to analyze or apply facts to a new situation rather than just recall the facts, and the student selects the correct answer, how the teacher can be sure that student didn't just get lucky and pick the right answer occasionally? It's impossible to
know what thinking led the student to pick that answer. We really do not know. At best, we can make some inferences about what that student might know and might be able to do with that knowledge. The evidence is very indirect, particularly for claims of meaningful application in complex, real-world situations. Authentic assessments, on the other hand, offer more direct evidence of application and construction of knowledge. Asking a student to write a critique should provide more direct evidence of that skill than asking the student a series of multiple-choice, analytical questions about a passage, although both assessments may be useful.
One more important point about authentic assessment is that the criteria of evaluation are known beforehand [2]. With AA, teachers are encouraged to teach to the test. Students need to learn how to perform well on meaningful tasks. To aid students in that process, it is to show them models of good (and not so good) performance. Furthermore, the student benefits from seeing the task rubric ahead of time as well. Authentic assessments typically do not lend themselves to mimicry. That is why there is not one correct answer to copy. So, by knowing what good performance looks like, and by knowing what specific characteristics make up good performance, students can better develop the skills and understanding necessary to perform well on these tasks.
Those two different approaches to assessment (AA and ST) also offer different advice about teaching to the test. Under the traditional assessment model, teachers have been discouraged from teaching to the test. That is because a test usually assesses a sample of students' knowledge and understanding and assumes that students' performance on the sample is representative of their knowledge of all the relevant material. If teachers focus primarily on the sample to be tested during instruction, then good performance on that sample does not necessarily reflect knowledge of all the material. So, teachers hide the test so that the sample is not known beforehand, and teachers are admonished not to teach to the test.
J. Michael O'Malley, supervisor of assessment at the Prince William County Public Schools of Virginia, and Lorraine Valdez Pierce, of the Graduate School of Education at George Mason University, have listed characteristics of authentic assessment [6].
• Constructed Response: The student constructs responses based on experiences he or she brings to the situation and new multiple resources are explored in order to create a product.
• Higher-Order Thinking: Responses are made to open-ended questions that require skills in analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
• Authenticity: Tasks are meaningful, challenging, and engaging activities that mirror good instruction often relevant to a real-world context.
• Integrative: Tasks call for a combination of skills that integrate language arts with other content across the curriculum with all skills and content open to assessment.
• Process and Product: Procedures and strategies for deriving potential responses and exploring multiple solutions to complex problems are often assessed in addition to or in place of a final product or single-correct-response.
• Depth in Place of Breadth: Performance assessments build over time with varied activities to reflect growth, maturity, and depth, leading to mastery of strategies and processes for solving problems in specific areas with the assumption that these skills will transfer to solving other problems.
O'Malley has also categorized common types of authentic assessment and the student actions that should be observed and documented. Their examples include the following:
• Oral Interviews: Teacher asks student questions about personal background, activities, readings, and other interests.
• Story or Text Retelling: Student retells main ideas or selected details of text experienced through listening or reading.
• Writing Samples: Student generates narrative, expository, persuasive, or reference paper.
• Projects / Exhibitions: Student works with other students as a team to create a project that often involves multimedia production, oral and written presentations, and a display.
• Experiments / Demonstrations: Student documents a series of experiments, illustrates a procedure, performs the necessary steps to complete a task, and documents the results of the actions.
• Constructed-Response Items: Student responds in writing to open-ended questions.
• Teacher Observations: Teacher observes and documents the students attention and interaction in class, response to instructional materials, and cooperative work with other students.
• Portfolios: A focused collection of student work to show progress
over time.
Assessment requires teacher evaluation of student performance. To aid in making such judgments accurate and valid (teachers measure what is intended to be measured), and reliable (performances tend to be measured in the same manner from one situation to the next), a scoring scale or rubric should be established. Often the levels of evaluation in a rubric are classified as 1 = basic, 2 = proficient, and 3 = advanced. The criteria for each performance level must be precisely defined in terms of what the student actually does to demonstrate skill or proficiency at that level.
Examples of rubric scales that reflect student progression in the use of information are as follows:
- Demonstrated indicator of student performance:
Integrates new information into one's own knowledge.
• Basic: Puts information together without processing it.
• Proficient: Integrates information from a variety of sources to create meaning that is relevant to own prior knowledge and draws conclusions.
• Advanced: Integrates information to create meaning that connects with prior personal knowledge, draws conclusions, and provides details and supportive evidence.
- Demonstrated indicator of student performance:
Distinguishes among fact, point of view, and opinion.
• Basic: Copies information as given and tends to give equal weight to fact and opinion as being evidence.
• Proficient: Uses both facts and opinions, but labels them within a paraphrased use of the evidence.
• Advanced: Links current, documented facts and qualified opinion to create a chain of evidence to support or reject an argument.
Furthermore, comparing authentic assessment with ordinary test, G. P. Wiggins notices that while multiple-choice tests can be valid indicators or predictors of academic performance, too often tests mislead students and teachers about the kinds of work that should be mastered. Norms are not standards; items are not real problems; right answers are not rationales [9].
Summing up, authentic assessment satisfies learners need, providing them with an opportunity to perform and show a wide range of skills both
language and communicative. It is also a source for a teacher who is focused on better students' progress as well as on coherent and demonstrative feedback which should be applied for further teaching. Comparing authentic assessment and traditional assessment, we found a number of valuable advantages of the former: authentic assessment courages learners to demonstrate the process of thinking, learners have to construct the answer, there is no chance to copy the right answers; learners know the criteria of the test well beforehand and know what a good performance is about, which helps learners to analyze their own answers and make them better, other words it involves and develops learners' critical thinking; tasks are selected and designed to look like real-world situations, which motivates learners to involve their own experience preparing answers, and motivates learners to make a better effort.
However, there are some crucial things to be studied. First of all, the term authentic assessment should be translated and explained according to Russian methodology. This work is still in process and is inseparably connected with the second stage, which is the creation of the system of authentic assessment that should be proved theoretically and practically. Thirdly, the system of authentic assessment should be developed based on formative assessment strategies. The foundations for creating AA tasks should be found in cross-curriculum areas.
REFERENCES
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2. Bushweller K. Teaching to the test // The American School Board Journal. -1997. - N 23. - P. 21-24.
3. Mueller J. Authentic Assessment toolbox. - URL : www.jfmueller. faculty. noctrl.edu
4. Newmann F. M. & Wehlage G. G. Five standards of authentic instruction. -Madison: Educational Leadership, 1993 - 28 p.
5. Newman D. Alternative Assessment: Promises and Pitfalls // School Library Media Annual / ed. by C. C. Kuhlthau. - Vol. 11. - Englewood : Libraries Unlimited, 1993. - P. 13-20.
6. O'Malley J. M., Lorraine V. P. Authentic Assessment for English Language Learning: Practical Approaches for Teachers. - New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1996. - 16 p.
7. Taylor A. K. Violating conventional wisdom in multiple choice test construction // College Student Journal. - 2005. - № 39 (1). - P. 141-153.
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8. Wiggins G. P. Assessing student performance: Exploring the purpose and limits of testing. - San Francisco : Jossey-Bass, 1993. - 148 p.
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