Reflection on the Evaluation courseBy Sebastián Pérez

Prof. Edgar PicónEscuela de IdiomasUniversidad de Antioquia

Before taking this course I had the vague idea that language frameworks were a fixed consensus by policy makers to have language standards in a certain population. Its theoretical underpinnings were therefore not totally clear to me. When being exposed to a comparison between some of the language models that support different conceptions of what it means to know a language, I came to realize that depending on this theory support, the language frameworks and consequently the assessment conception would also be affected.

Getting to elaborate this relationship myself has been paramount in my development as a teacher. It has allowed me to conceive assessment procedures not just as a preference choice, but as the alignment of my teaching principles with the actual assessment practices that constitute a big part of my way of teaching. I feel now more empowered as a teacher when I choose between the late model of Bachman and Palmer or the one by Celce-Murcia et al. ('95), depending on my teaching and assessing purposes.

Another contribution from this course has been to provide me with a wide variety of elements relating to the multiplism perspective in language assessment. This range of alternatives are now not only a matter of including different learning styles, but also multiple definitions on language use and procedures for measuring, and more importantly: the multiple purposes of the assessment practices. Among the latter, the use of assessment procedures to improve my students’ learning has been a paramount achievement for me in this course, allowing me to use these procedures for formative purposes and for holding my students accountable.

The above-mentioned theoretical discoveries have offered me practical elements that can support my process of developing my own assessment procedures as an English teacher. I feel this support especially in terms of the improved fairness and wider inclusion that my assessment practices are now able to provide. In this sense, the fact that some of my students have any difficulties in any of the skills that make up a particular language competence will not mean anymore that they will have low grades when unable to cope with learning obstacles. I will therefore be able to reevaluate my practices on the go and to make modifications so the lower achieving students with some of my teaching and assessing procedures can also have an opportunity to scaffold on their learning difficulties.

The experience of creating a rubric and sharing its different development stages with both classmates and the teacher has been very enriching. Having been exposed myself to the design of rubrics. I have to admit that although I was able to comply with the requirements of the program I teach at, I only did so by borrowing different elements from rubrics models or by accepting suggestions with just an authority argument. This shared experience of commenting every single step in he process of creating a rubric has given me the elements and confidence to make my own decisions when designing one or to check if it is really serving the purpose I want it to.

This collaborative construction of assessment procedures made me realize issues that I had not considered before in my practices, such as the validity and the reliability my assessment instruments should account for. To this regard, being aware of factors that could possibly alter the consistency of the results I get with an assessment procedure have warned me of the risks it could entail and pointed to some possible strategies to overcome the associated barriers. Moreover, when it comes to validity issues, my professor’s comments on my classmates’ attempts and mine helped reposition myself as an assessment designer and notice that not we were not always assessing what we intended to. This realization I see also as one major contribution that will assist me in bringing fairness and a sound rationale to my assessment practices.