When considering the critical questions we
should ask ourselves as teachers when assessing students by means of tests, it
is necessary to think about the first thing that we must try to avoid, and it
is that a lot of teachers don’t even think of others apart from themselves,
they do not devote time to set the purpose or the objectives of what they have
to assess, and they do not go through the necessary process that leads into
effective assessment practices. As teachers we already know unconsciously that
the tests are made to evaluate students’ performance and to know if they are
learning what is being taught during the lesson; what we sometimes ignore is
the different kinds of tests that can be applied to students according to their
needs and also our needs as tutors. This lack of information and instruction
about tests can lead us to assess our students in ways that do not match the
purposes, and to obtain results that are not reliable.
The language aptitude tests seem unreliable
to me… I don’t think that in a few questions anyone can determine whether you
are good or not for something like languages –or anything-. There are plenty of
factors that influence your process, such as your attitude and disposition to
decide to learn, the time you spent studying, and so on and so forth. I’ve had
many students that, although they don’t seem very “talented” (maybe their
intelligences point towards other areas), they study a lot and manage to
accomplish things that many others who seem to have aptitudes for the language
don’t.
I do agree with the placement and
diagnostic tests, since these are indeed helpful for the teachers. It is great
to know that you have a group in which all students have the same level, this
fact reduces the great number of concerns you have at the moment of teaching
during a lesson and gives you some kind of confidence at the moment of
challenging your students. Apart from that, if you also know the different
outstanding abilities of each of the students, it is easier to plan the lesson
taking into account those aspects.
It seems to me that although we are more
familiar with proficiency, placement and diagnostic tests –as students and
teachers- we still need to pay more attention to the way those test are
designed and to the situations in which each one of them is taken by students,
we must always try to assess them in the proper way so that better results in
their processes are achieved.
