Abstract
The chapter aims at giving insights to English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers on creating and designing achievement tests through digital tools for checking their student' progress and teaching/learning process. As language learners may have concerns and barriers regarding the assessment and testing issues, the administration of digital tools for that purpose is believed to contribute to both students' development by lowering their anxiety levels and accordingly teachers' future practices. Based on the feedback on students' performance gathered through digital tools, teachers and other stakeholders can find the opportunity to re-organize teaching materials, tasks, or the coursebooks. EFL teachers may also be provoked to use some other digital tools not included in that chapter by following the procedures in the activity plans for their future assessment practices.
TopIntroduction
Tests have become commonly and popularly used language testing and assessment methods in the educational world. A test, at its simplest, can be defined as a method of measuring a person’s ability or knowledge in a given domain (Brown, 2001). There are many kinds of tests, each with a specific purpose and a criterion to be measured. Among all the kinds of the tests, achievement tests are the most common and popular ones that are related to classes, course units or the total curriculum. They can be applied to check whether the course objectives or unit outcomes of a lesson are satisfied following a period of instruction. Most of the language teachers tend to use achievement tests to simply give some test scores to their students or, more importantly, to detect the strengths or weaknesses of their learners regarding the achievement of the course objectives. Through the achievement tests, language teachers can rearrange the techniques, materials or activities they employ in their classes in line with the underlying principles of dynamic assessment.
Despite this popularity and usefulness of achievement tests, preparing quality test items requires some great efforts and elaboration on the side of the language teachers. Creating quality and dependable tests which are administrable within the given constraints and accurately measure what they aim to measure has been a popular topic of discussion among the test developers for years. Despite the ongoing discussions on how to create and structure valid, reliable and practical tests to measure language skills and components, language learners too often feel anxious and tense when taking achievement tests, and they may get disappointed when they cannot make the expected grade. Under the influence of such feelings, many language learners may refrain from giving answers to test questions or totally avoid taking tests. Therefore, language teachers need to find some alternative ways to deal with these negative affective factors while administering tests to their students. At that point, using some contemporary technological tools can be the simplest, or the most complicated for some language teachers, solution for overcoming the barriers of anxiety and inhibition.
The use of technology for language teaching and learning has been widely accepted as an inevitable practice in today’s digital age. This necessity and importance of technology use have led many professionals or organizations to elaborate on some guidelines or frameworks for the effective use of technology in and out of the classroom. As one of these organizations, TESOL Technology Standards Project Team published TESOL Technology Standards Framework (Healey et al., 2008) to provide guidance to language teachers and learners for implementing technology rather than setting barriers or unrealistic expectations about it. As one of the goals in the technology standards for teachers, it is stated in the framework that language teachers apply technology in record-keeping, feedback, and assessment. They can evaluate and implement relevant technology to aid in effective learner assessment. Therefore, they need to demonstrate familiarity with a variety of forms of assessment that employ technology. According to the performance indicators of the framework, language teachers can use technological tools for diagnostic, summative and formative testing.
Considering the necessity and popularity of achievement tests, the concerns and barriers of the language learners regarding these tests and the use of technology for language assessment as a standard, the current chapter of the book will try to give some insights to language teachers to design and create achievement tests for their learners by using some technological tools. This chapter will suggest some Web 2.0 tools (namely, Nearpod, Wordwall and Kahoot) especially for K-12 learners at primary, lower secondary and upper secondary school levels. Sample activity plans will be given for the language teachers so that they can design and create their own diagnostic tests using these tools. Suggested Web 2.0 tools presents examples of formative assessment and dynamic media features and templates to guide teachers’ performances and improve student outcomes. They employ artificial intelligence (AI) strategies in a diverse range of tasks from deciding how to lay out items on the screen to figuring out how to best switch one template into another. The current chapter will try to support English language teachers in their classroom practices and objectives by simply indicating and elaborating on the use of these digital tools with some sample activities for language assessment.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Formative Assessment: It is a process including teacher’s feedback delivery on student performance, student’s internalization of the feedback and formation of learning accordingly.
Summative Assessment: It is carried out at the end of a course or instructional unit as it tries to measure or summarize what a student has learned.
Informal Assessment: They are the incidental, unplanned comments and reactions, mentoring, and other impromptu feedback to the students.
Achievement Tests: They are the tests that aims to establish how successful students or classes have been in achieving the course objectives.
Assessment: It is the process of collecting information about something that we are interested in.
Language Assessment: It is the process of collecting information about test takers’ performance to interpret some aspects of their language ability to make some decisions about their performance and teaching learning process.
Formal Assessment: They are the systematic, deliberate strategies designed to provide teachers and students with an evaluation of student performance and achievement.