LECTURE SIX

EVALUATION

By Alec

Evaluation is the teacher’s assessment of a student’s abilities in the four language skills, based on the student’s classroom performance. Evaluation consists of:

Formative evaluation—The assessment of a student’s mastery of specific elements which have been taught, in order to determine what still remains to be mastered; and

Summative evaluation—The general assessment at the end of a course of instruction; the evaluation is usually made for grading purposes.

Evaluation, as a matter of fact, includes that of teacher performance. Performance objectives may be developed to measure teacher performance as well as student performance.

Teacher evaluation may be thought of as consisting two complementary aspects: the evaluation of the teacher’s personal qualifications and the evaluation of his effectiveness in the classroom.

A teacher’s qualifications fall into three categories: subject matter competence, professional competence, and personal attitudes. In foreign language teaching, subject matter competence refers to the teacher’s command of the foreign language, his acquaintance with the foreign culture, and his knowledge of the literature and civilization of the country or countries where the language is spoken. Professional competence refers to the teacher’s behavior in the classroom, his ability to plan lessons, his use of specific teaching techniques, his preparation of appropriate tests, and the like. Personal attitude is the affective aspect of the teacher’s personal activities. It concerns his attitude towards his subject matter, his colleagues, and his students and their problems.

The teacher’s effectiveness can be measured in terms of results. In the subject matter area, this refers to the students’ attainment of subject matter performance objectives. In the affective domain, this refers to the students’ attitude in class, their motivation, and their extra-curricular activities related to the foreign language learning.

Next, we focus on the evaluation of students’ performance—testing, and the purposes of educational tests.

When a teacher sets out to design an examination at the end of a course (summative evaluation), his first aim should be to make the examination mirror exactly the objectives of the course. This means that, even before he starts to teach the course, he must be so well aware of what he wants his students to achieve that the broad outlines of the examination he will give them are already in his mind.

The teacher’s aims, therefore, need to be very carefully formulated. He needs to know not only what his students will know by the end of the course, but also what they should be able to do. The answers to these questions will contain the objectives, or aims, of the course. He must also know the students’ knowledge and skills can be best demonstrated. The answer to this question will indicate the kind of examination he needs.

In order to answer these questions, the subject matter of the course will need to be very carefully analyzed. The teacher will get some help from textbooks, and from his colleagues, but in the end it is only his own special knowledge and his experience of the students which can tell him whether or not his objectives are realistic and his expectations of the students are fair.

Suppose, for example, that in this course of English Language Teaching, I was already told to design an examination for the end of this course. During the course, I may have covered or am going to cover some major topics, such as language, or language learning, or skills. For each major topic I will decide what you, in my opinion, should master. First, presumably, there will be certain facts, like the definition of the term “language”, that you must memorize. Next, I will probably make sure that what you have learnt and what you have thought about, has built up to the attainment of certain concepts or certain systematic knowledge of language teaching, at least in the form of an outline. Then, I may wish to get you to understand the relationships existing between some of the concepts, or those between theory and your own experience. And I may wish that the knowledge acquired might be required to apply to new problems.

Of course, the teacher is unlikely to have spent equal amounts of teaching time on each aspect of the subject; he may well spend much of his time teaching specific items of information. If his students are more advanced, they may have been more concerned with applying their knowledge of concepts and principles to new problems. If the examination is to be a fair one, therefore, it will accurately reflect the balance of the course.

About the purposes of educational tests, I should say, they may have a number of different and distinctive purposes, but the general emphasis of the test will depend on the teacher’s specific objectives.

Firstly, tests may be given to find out whether a student is ready for a particular course of instruction. Thus, selection, or “screening” tests are used to separate those who are prepared for a particular kind of training from those who are not. Such tests have a pass mark to distinguish those who pass from those who fail.

Other screening tests may be used to determine degrees of proficiency or readiness. On the basis of such tests, a group of students will be divided into the classes, streams or sets indicated by the results shown in the test. There is no question of passing or failing, since everyone goes on to study further.

Diagnostic tests diagnose an individual’s particular strengths and weakness. These tests will measure different kinds of skill within one subject. A diagnostic test in English may show the teacher a particular student is good at listening, but cannot speak and is hopeless at writing. The teacher can then arrive at a performance profile, which will show the student’s relative abilities in the areas tested.

Tests may be used to measure aptitude for a particular kind of study. At the time of taking the test, the student may have little or no knowledge of the subject he is to be tested in, and the test is used to assess his possible future potential.

Achievement tests measure the progress made after a particular course of study or training program has been carried out. Final examinations are examples of achievement tests.

Tests may also be given to evaluate the effectiveness of the teaching after a course of instruction has been completed. These tests are often given by educational researchers, who might teach two classes the same subject using different methods, then test them, and compare the results of the test to find out which method has had the greatest success.

Finally, I’d like to quote two pieces of warning for your reference:

An examination must always be regarded as something secondary, a by-product which the student will take in his stride. It must never be regarded as an end in itself. An intermediate course should not only enable a student to go on learning English systematically, but should incidentally enable him to pass an examination without preparation.

             ----- L. G. Alexander

Examinations are made for the students; not the students made for examinations.

Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more that the wisest can answer.

             ----- C. C. Colton