I was recently on tour in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Croatia, giving various talks and workshops. One of these, entitled Testing 1—2—3, was on three types of assessment – Summative Assessment, Formative Assessment, and Learning Oriented Assessment (LOA). With the teachers, we first reviewed the definitions and then focused on putting some LOA techniques into practice in the classroom. I’d like to do the same thing with you in this post.
Most of the teachers were familiar (as I’m sure you are) with the difference between summative and formative assessment, but they nonetheless appreciated the definitions I provided from the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment:
‘Summative assessment sums up attainment at the end of a course with a grade… summative assessment is norm-based, fixed-point achievement assessment.’
‘Formative assessment is an ongoing process of gathering information on the extent of learning, on strengths and weaknesses which the teacher can feed back into course planning and the actual feedback they give learners.’
But Learning Oriented Assessment was a new term for many of the teachers. Just in case it might be new to you too, here’s a definition from the person who apparently coined the term, James Purpura: Learning Oriented Assessment ‘… involves the collection and interpretation of evidence about performance so that judgements can be made about further language development.’
How can we put Learning Oriented Assessment into practice in the classroom? Here are five LOA teaching techniques taken from the Teacher’s Books for Cambridge English Empower that we looked at with the Czech, Slovak and Croatian teachers. (To find out more about LOA and Empower click here.)
1. Eliciting
Before reading a text, listening to dialogue or starting to work on a lexical set, eliciting ideas from the class not only lets you gauge learners’ interest in the subject but also gives you information about what they already know or need to be taught.
2. Concept checking
After practicing an activity, make sure to check that the students have understood the concept. If you are teaching colours to beginners, for example, this could be done be having them point to items of clothing of the different colours that their classmates are wearing. If some of the students point incorrectly, then you know they haven’t understood and that you should do more practice before carrying on.
3. Monitoring
While the class is working on an activity, you of course will be going around the room observing. This can be either: ‘discreet monitoring’ when you notice and note down particular individual or whole-class problems; or ‘participatory monitoring’ when you sit down with a pair or group to support them or just to join in.
4.Drilling
Most of the teachers agreed that there is still a place in the communicative classroom for drilling. So, say you are working on the past simple and you realise that some students’ pronunciation isn’t ‘intelligible’. Why not have an oral-choral group drill (Invite them to stand up!) where you give a sentence in the present, the ‘cue’, and the class all together as a group gives the ‘response’ by putting the sentence into the past.
5.Review and reflect
Getting and giving feedback is good learner training and helps lead to learner independence. The feedback you give to individual learners on a piece of written work, for example, will be different for different learners with the aim of guiding them individually. But the TKT Course terms formative assessment ‘informal assessment’ and reminds us that ‘Informal assessment is sometimes used to assess students’ behaviour, attitudes or learner characteristics rather than their language abilities.’ So sometimes at the end of a class or at the end of a week, why not ask the students to write down (in their native language if it’s a low-level class) what they liked and didn’t like about the class(es) and what they learned or what they didn’t learn but wanted to.