Observational methods help identify attitudes, unconscious reactions, practical skills, and some cognitive skills.

Normally, teachers can use three types of tools to collect information: Record of daily events, scale and checklist.

1. Record daily events

Every day teachers work with students, observe students and record a lot of information about student learning activities. For example, student A mispronounces a few simple words, student B always lacks attention and looks out the window. Student C always finishes his assignments early and helps others in practice... Such daily trifles are important in the assessment. It helps teachers predict students' abilities and behavior in different situations or account for results obtained from students' written tests.

However, teachers do not have the ability to observe and record all the behaviors, events, and aspects of a student's everyday situations, even though they can all be valuable information. Therefore, it is necessary to have a choice in observation. For observation and recording to be possible, teachers need to:

Direct observations to behaviors that cannot be assessed by other methods.
Limit observations to certain types of behavior according to the teacher's instructional goals.
Limiting the field of view to a few students requires special help from the teacher.

Teachers can use notebooks. Each student should be given a few sheets of a notebook, which should separate the description of the event from the teacher's comment on the event.

In order to record students' daily events effectively, teachers need to follow a few requirements:

Identify events to be observed in advance, but also pay attention to unusual events.
Observe and fully record the event put in a specific situation to make the event more meaningful.
Events should be recorded as soon as possible.
Each record should focus on only 1 event.
Separate the actual description of the event and the individual teacher's comments.
It is necessary to record both positive and negative behaviors
It is necessary to collect enough information before making comments and assessments about students' behavior and attitudes.

2. The scale

Evaluation by scale should follow the following principles:

The criteria of the scale need to be important teaching and educational content
The descriptions in the scale must be directly observable
Levels and level descriptions of the scale must be clearly defined.
Should include 3 to 7 levels in the scale and allow the scale user to mark the interval between the levels.
Should allow users of the scale to omit the sentences that they feel there is not enough evidence to rate.
If possible, the results of multiple observers should be combined on the same subject.

3. Checklist

Checklists (checklists) have almost the same form and use as a scale. However, the scale requires the evaluator to indicate the degree of manifestation of a quality or the frequency of a behavior, while the checklist only requires the rater to answer a simple Yes - No question. It is a method of recording whether a quality manifests or a behavior is performed.

In practice assessment, checklists can be designed in the following steps:

Identify each specific behavior in practice activities
Can add misbehavior if it is useful for evaluation
Put the actions in the correct order
Instructions on how to mark behaviors when they appear (or number the acts in order of execution).

These methods of observation require constant and constant teacher attention to properly assess a problem. In the process of observing and evaluating, teachers also need to perform the work of remembering or taking full notes. This observation will help teachers have the right view for students and take measures to correct problems in a timely manner.

See:

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1206295.pdf

https://www.qcaa.qld.edu.au/downloads/publications/research_qscc_assess_report_4.pdf