[Assessment] testing in small programsGuthrie, Burr bguthrie at tamdistrict.orgThu Nov 10 17:22:28 EST 2005
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
More information about the Assessment mailing list |