Assessment and Evaluation
Towards Designing an Aligned Analytic Rubric: The Development of Rubric Calculator Tool
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Bhavani Sridharan
This paper offers an "automated rubric calculator tool" to effectively align an analytic rubric to resolve a variety of the problems arising from inadvertent inaccuracies in the distribution of marks and the resulting student dissatisfaction. Embracing criterion-referenced rubric is becoming a norm in higher education institutions in recent years for a number of compelling reasons. However, the true benefit of utilizing an analytic rubric will be negated if it is not effectively aligned with respect to subjective and objective standards. Even though aligning subjective standard is challenging, extensive resources are available from research and development to design an effective rubric. Conversely, aligning objective standards is an intuitive process, but laborious and error-prone process. Yet, there has been dearth of research and development to support practitioners in this area. To fill this gap, this paper provides an automated solution to facilitate seamlessly designing an effective rubrics.
Formative Assessment in Jamaican Classrooms: Towards a Model for More Effective Implementation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Clavia Williams-McBean
Formative assessment has been heralded as germane to effective teaching and learning. However, despite an increasing trend of a pedagogical shift from behaviourism to constructivism, teachers’ classroom assessment strategies have remained largely traditional and summative. This mixed-methods study explored how formative assessment may be more effectively infused into the teaching of English in Jamaican secondary schools. Data generated through cases studies of secondary school teachers from the 5 types of secondary schools in Jamaica were analyzed using ANCOVA and the general inductive approach. Results showed that secondary school teachers predominantly used traditional assessment tools and strategies and for summative purposes despite school type and rank. They also suggest that if formative assessment is to be effectively infused into the Language classroom, steps will have to be taken to encourage greater use of alternative assessment tools and strategies by classroom teachers and greatest consideration has to be given to assessment factors, specifically national and schools’ assessment policies. The findings have implications for teacher training institutions as well as school and national assessment policies.
Evaluating Three Decades of Studies into Concordance-based Cloze Testing: Some Insights for Future Directions
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kunlaphak Kongsuwannakul
This paper evaluates ideas from selected studies into concordance-based cloze testing (henceforth ConCloze). The aim is to produce useful insights about its future directions from research spanning over three decades. The investigation is divided into five stages of evolution of the item type, potentially considered to resemble metamorphosis. Starting with an embryonic stage, advances in corpus linguistics in the 1970–80s are believed to give birth to the first concordance-based class exercises. The exercises then hatch out in the 1990s as an item prototype relying on the cloze procedure. Albeit with some substantive distinctions from the present form of ConCloze, this prototype may be deemed to be its precursor, and hence the larval stage. Then in the 2000s, the item type undergoes a silence period, receiving virtually no attention in the literature altogether. It is underrecognized for potential to contribute to language testing, and so the decade represents its pupal stage. Amidst some near misses seen in the literature, the present decade witnesses a growing interest in ConCloze. Centering primarily on its construct validity potentially marks a dawn of a series of validation inquiries. The future adulthood would begin by a momentum gathered with research along Messick’s (1989) validity facets. An inference from the investigation could be that concordances are useful for both supplying linguistic features to test writing and validation and making the very content for practical testing. Opportunities to test designers and English teachers worldwide are also implied, such as for a fairer assessment through a larger test-writing toolkit.
