Til bo’yicha bilimlarni baxolash turlari va me’zonlari

DETERMINING THE PURPOSE OF A TEST
You may think that every test you devise must be a wonderfully innovative instrument that impresses your colleagues and students alike. Not so. First, new and innovative testing formats take a lot of effort to design and a long time to refine through trial and error. Second, traditional testing techniques can, with a little creativity, conform to the spirit of an interactive, co mmunicative language curriculum. Your best course of action as a new teacher is to work within the guidelines of accepted, known, traditional testing techniques. Slowly, with experience, you can attempt bolder designs. In that spirit, let’s consider some practical steps in constructing classroom tests. The first and perhaps most important step in designing any sort of classroom assessment (or in determining the appropriateness of an existing test) is to step back and consider the overall purpose of the exercise that your students are about to perform. The purpose of an assessment is what Bachman and Palmer (1996, pp. 17 -19) refer to as test usefulness or, very simply put, to what use will you put an assessment? Consider the checklist on the next page for determining purpose and usefulness of an assessment:
PURPOSE AND USEFULNESS CHECKLIST
1. Do I need to administer a test at this point in my course? If so, what purpose will it serve the students and/or me?
2. What is its significance relative to my course?
3. Is it simply an expected way to mark the end of a lesson, unit, or period of time?
4. How important is it compared to other student performance?
5. Do I want to use results to determine if my students have met certain predetermined curricular standards?
6. Do I genuinely want students to be recipients of beneficial washback?
7. Will I use the results as a means to allocate my own pedagogical efforts in the days or weeks to follow?
8. What will its impact be on what I do, and what students do, before and the test?
Now look back at each of the two assessment scenarios and think about the purpose of each. Before reading on, do some personal brainstorming on just how the eight questions in the checklist will be answered for each scenario.
Reading Quiz. To start your thinking process, let’s look at the purpose of the first scenario—the reading quiz. The quiz is designed to be an instructional tool to guide classroom discussion for one classroom period. Its significance is minor but not trivial when viewed against the backdrop of the whole course. Because it is a surprise test and a tool for teaching and self-assessment, the results will justifiably not be recorded, and so one student’s performance compared to others is irrelevant. It is entirely formative in nature, with the almost exclusive purpose of providing beneficial washback. Forcing students to think independently about the reading passage allows them to see areas of strength and weakness in their comprehension skills.
Can you now consider the second scenario and think about the overall purpose of it given the context described and the information given? Your understanding of the purpose of an assessment procedure governs, to a great extent, the next steps you take in identifying clear objectives, designing test specifications, constructing tasks, and determining scoring and reporting criteria.