particularly in high-stakes contexts. These concerns relate to:
• The validity and reliability of the assessment tools that are used.
• Their administrative feasibility and cost effectiveness.
• Teachers’ preparedness to take on an enhanced assessment role.
Research in both general education and language learning contexts suggests that
using a small number of context-specific assessment tasks results in low levels
of generalizability, thus severely limiting the inferences that can be made about
a learner’s ability (Brindley, 2000a). At the same time, considerable variability
has been identified in teacher-developed assessment tasks (Wigglesworth, 2000),
making comparability across tasks difficult and potentially diminishing the value
of information on student learning outcomes. Other reliability issues which have
been identified include the difficulties of obtaining acceptable levels of agreement
between raters on the quality of student writing portfolios (Hamp-Lyons, 1996)
and inconsistencies in teachers’ observations of student performance (Rea-Dickins
and Gardner, 2000; Brindley, 2001b). These issues of reliability have served to
highlight some inherent problems related to teacher-conducted assessment and
rating, not the least of which is teacher expertise. In this regard, researchers have
pointed out that teachers cannot necessarily be expected to possess the skills
needed to develop and administer high quality assessments that can be used in
high stakes situations. For this reason, it has been argued that a serious investment
in ongoing professional development on the part of educational authorities is
necessary if teachers are to become the principal agents of assessment (Brindley,
2001a; Inbar-Lourie, 2008). In terms of practicality, research studies have
consistently demonstrated that as well as requiring higher levels of skill on the
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