Unit 22 Choosing assessment activities • How do we choose assessment activities?

Assessment activity
Comments
Cloze test (Students complete a text with every nth word blanked out)
Gap-fill (Students complete a text with selected words blanked out.)
Reordering jumbled sentences

Every assessment activity has advantages and disadvantages. For this reason a good formal test includes a v a r i e t y of assessment activities. For example, activities such as multiple-choice or true/false, which test single items, are easy to mark and give us clear information about specific areas of the learners' language knowledge. However, such activities, with a single focus, do not tell us anything about the learners' ability to produce longer samples of language. By contrast, activities such as interviews or summary writing can give us much more information about learners' language knowledge or their ability to use the language. But because these activities test so many things at the same time, it may be difficult for us to focus on particular areas fo a learner’s perfotmance.

Single-focus activities(e.g. multiple-choice, true/false) are very practicalto desong and can give us reliable results, but they usually test knowledge about rather than use of language, and so are rather unrealistic, and can have a negative effect on the way we teach. Activities that require learners to produce whole texts or longer samples of spoken language, on the other hand, are far less practical to mark and the results may not be very reliable. But they enable learners to produce language which is very similar to the language they need to produce in the real world.
Single-focus activities are very useful for assessing r e c e p t i v e skills, where we want to check that learners have understood a taxt. We can best assess productive skills with extended activities. ( e.g summary writing, interview). Although these era less practical to mark, they have the advantage of putting learners in a situation where they have to use the language in the same way as in everyday life.
As mentioned in Unit 18, when we decide between subjective and objective test types, there are advantages and disadvantages to consider. The solution is often to use both types of activity.
The formal assessment activities discussed above are used to assess learners on a single occasion, like a photograph. We can use an informal assessment activity, continuous assessment or a portfolio, tc assess students over time, more like a film. A portfolio can contain all of the student's work for a period of time, or just a selection of the work. Sometimes it will also include some kind of e v a l u a t i o n written by the student of his/her own work. By looking at astudent's portfolio we can assess their progress over alonger period of time. Portfolios can be used bothfor assessment by the teacher and for self-assessment. There are a number of advantages to portfolio assessment: