Our agency offers ESL classes only two nights/week and as we are bound
to CASAS by 231 money, it is challenging to accumulate adequate hours of
attendance to show learning gains.  A teacher offers the following
perceptions of required assessment and I would welcome comments.  

 

On testing I don't have a complaint in principle. There has to be some
means
of accountability and a test is probably a necessary evil.
    But after only two months instruction I think it's pretty pointless.
50% attendance is pretty good for my class, which means that we are
preparing to test many students after only 20-30 hours of classroom
instruction.  That's way too soon to expect any improvement.  Plus, the
first hour of instruction is constantly interrupted by students arriving
late - one by one for forty-five minutes or an hour.  So in terms of
effective teaching time, the class is more like two hours long.  And the
last half hour (9:00 to 9:30) the students are so tired, I'm not sure
much
is registering.  And given the erratic nature of attendance in general,
homework is out of the question.  I had 14 students last Thursday and
double
that number tonight.  Attendance is totally unpredictable and therefore
it's
impossible to carry over one lesson to another.
    On top of that, you have the fact that students who are surrounded
by
non-English speakers at home and at work, are at a big disadvantage
vis-a-vis those students who have the opportunity (and in some cases the
obligation) to use English outside of class.  There is no way for a test
to
distinguish a student who has to use English outside of class from one
who
can't find the opportunity to use English no matter how much he/she
might
want to.  This necessarily distorts the results of every test.
    Take Wey, for example.  Her husband is British.  If she wants to
communicate with him at all, she has to use English.  That gives her a
huge
advantage over the students who live in apartment buildings where all
the
residents are immigrants.  Her improvement since you had her in the
summer
has a lot more to do with her interaction with her husband than it does
with
your or my teaching effectiveness.  There's just no way for CASAS or any
other test to account for this.  But it's basic.
    I think the figure that Sasha gave us in the meeting - supposedly
empirically validated -  that it takes 100 hours of instruction before
improvement takes place - makes a lot of sense.  Is there any way we
could
restrict testing to those students who have logged 100 hours of class
time
since the LAST test they took?  That would give them an incentive to
attend
class regularly.   Otherwise, it strikes me as a lot of paper shuffling
for
little purpose.

mks

 

Burr Guthrie

Adult Education

Tamalpais Union High School District

375 Doherty Drive

Larkspur, CA  93949

415-945-3789

415-945-3767 fax

bguthrie at tamdistrict.org