Classroom assessment is the act of collecting information about students, curricula, and methodology with the aim of making decisions concerning students’ needs and teacher’s objectives.
Classroom Assessment Should Help the Teachers in:
- Determining students’ strengths and weaknesses.
- Determining the learning styles of the students.
- Learning about students’ interests in various topics.
- Classifying students into groups based on their learning abilities, personal interests, characteristics, and achievements.
- Monitoring and following the progress of individual students.
- Providing feedback about students’ achievement.
- Specifying suitable teaching materials and activities.
- Discovering what students have learned and what they still need to learn.
- Deciding what to teach next.
- Determining how to adapt lesson content to students’ needs and learning styles.
- Evaluating the effectiveness of teaching methods.
- Assigning grades and feedback to students.
- Giving feedback to parents.
- Giving feedback to other teachers in the school and the principal.
- Communicating with other professionals to provide more effective courses.
- Recycling and revising previous lesson content.
The Most Common Form of Classroom Assessment
Conducting tests whether they are oral or in writing during the English language course is the most common form of the classroom assessment. We usually conduct a test for one or more of the following:
- Collecting information about where students are in their learning to decide what to cover next.
- Highlighting what needs to be reviewed. (Which parts need to be revised).
- Deciding whether teaching is effective or not (Assessment of teaching).
- Giving students a sense of achievement (What they know/What they should know).
- Giving students a learning opportunity after finishing the test. (The test is a review in itself and a chance for learning from mistakes).
- Assessing students’ strengths and weaknesses indicating to which skills students are good at and which ones they need more practice on.
- Giving feedback to parents, other teachers, the school, the principal …… to all who matter.
- Discovering what students have already learned and what they still need to learn.
- Deciding what to teach next and which methods should be used.
The Most Common Aspects of Students’ Assessment
- Participation in group work.
- Ability to express in speech.
- Ability to express in writing.
- Listening comprehension.
- Reading comprehension.
- The neatness of handwriting.
- Use of the school library.
- The response that shows understanding.
- Oral activities: discussion and answering questions.
- Sharing in planning and preparing wall magazines.
- Co-operation with the teacher and classmates.
- Bringing books and doing homework.
- Participation in class activities.
- Continuity of progress in learning and of dealing with good behaviour.
Decisions Made By Classroom Assessment
Classroom assessment can help the teachers make decisions concerning their teaching. These decisions depend on answering the following questions before, during and after teaching any lesson. They are as follows:
1. Assessment-based decisions made by specifying the following before the lesson.
- Input students need to learn.
- Interests of my students that I need to consider as I plan my lesson.
- Materials appropriate to use with students.
- Learning activities that I need my students to engage in during the lesson.
- Objectives that I want my students to achieve as a result of my teaching.
- How I will organize and arrange the students in the class for the lesson activities.
2. Assessment-based decisions made by answering questions during the lesson.
- Is my lesson going well? Are students learning?
- What should I do to make this lesson/activity work better?
- What feedback should I give individual students about the quality of their learning?
- Are my students ready to move to the next activity in the learning sequence?
3. Assessment-based decisions made by answering questions after the lesson.
- How well do my students achieve my objectives?
- What strengths and weaknesses should I report about students’ learning?
- How effectively did my students learn this lesson?
- How effective were the materials, activities, class organization, and teaching techniques I used?
Thanks For Reading
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