Striving For Authentic Assessment of ELLs

1. Striving For Authentic Assessment of ELLs

2. The Issue of Grading • How do teachers grade ELLs that are newly arrived versus those that are ready to transition into general education classes? • Multiple sources for grading are needed so that a students academic knowledge and level of English language proficiency are assessed. • Representation of the following is needed: • Student self-assessment (the older the students, the greater responsibility for their own learning • Performance assessment (where students have opportunities to demonstrate learning through tasks and projects that are interpreted by rubrics) • Traditional testing formats • Gottlieb, M. (2006). Assessing English Language Learners bridges from language proficiency to academic achievement. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press.

3. Issues in Assessment For English Language Learners, challenges on assessments can arise from unfamiliar vocabulary use, limited schooling experiences, and limited schooling in L1. • Background knowledge and past educational experiences also play a role in how ELLs perform on standardized assessments. • Questions that ask students to reflect past experiences with particular school-based practices may not produce an accurate assessment of English proficiency; a student with less experience about certain activities mentioned would be graded • lower than a student who has more • experience with such activities. • Yet these students may have the • same language ability.

4. Collaboration The key to successful performance-based assessment lies in Gottlieb’s extended metaphor of a bridge that connects classroom activities with real-world activitiesand language to what they are learning. Performance-based assessment gives teachers various ways to obtain information about their ELL students and can provide a complete picture of what these students know, how they interpret the material, and what they are capable of doing. Real World Issues Creativity Hands on Communication

5. Formative Assessment can enhace learning when it provides students with feedback about specific qualities of their work, and about how to improve.

6. Conditions for successful formative assessment include: 1.The student and teacher share a common understanding of what is quality work. They have the same standards for achievement. This can be achieved with a rubric. 2.Student and teacher can compare the student's performance to these standards. ◦The student assesses as s/he is working on the task at hand, and upon completion. 3.Following the assessment, teaching and learning activities are adjusted to close the gap between the student's performance and the standard. ◦The teacher not only assesses the student's performance, but also provides feedback (guidance) to the student enabling him/her to improve his/her performance. ◦The student will use what s/he has learned from the assessment to improve future performances. Work can be collected in a portfolio. ◦The teacher also assesses the instruction that preceded the performance. The teacher will adjust their instruction based on this assessment. http://www.exemplars.com/resources/formative-assessment

7. Rubrics Rubrics are effective when they give immediate and corrective feedback. The most effective feedback is detailed, descriptive, and timely. The timing of feedback appears to be critical to its effectiveness.… In general, the more delay that occurs in giving feedback, the less improvement there is in achievement. Marzano, R., Pickering, D., & Pollock, J. (2001). Classroom instruction that works: Research based strategies for increasing student achievement.Alexandria: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. “Feedback to any pupil should be about the particular qualities of his or her work, with advice on what he or she can do to improve and should avoid comparisons with other pupils.” WestEd. (2010). “Formative Assessment: Not Just Another Test.” R&D Alert, Vol.11, No.2. San Francisco, CA: Author. “Empirical studies document that faculty and students find rubrics to be a useful and appreciated means of communicating the expectations of assignments and providing a clear set of standards by which student work will be assessed. A small number of studies demonstrate a connection between rubric use and higher levels of performance.” Cheyney, D. (2010). The use of rubrics for assessment of student learning in higher education. (Doctoral dissertation), Available from EBSCOhost. (978-1-1245-3922-5)Retrieved from http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdis

8. Assessment Portfolios Student and Teacher Reflection Evidence of Progress Accountability

9. Assessment Portfolios Assessment portfolios are a venue by which our understanding of ELLs can be stored and maintained over time. They provide documentation and evidence of the progress of our students. • Portfolios should contain work that captures an ELLs language proficiency and academic achievement through performance assessment. Assessment portfolios can include: • Student work showing learning in L1 and L2 • Interdependence between oral language and literacy development • Fused language and content • Higher-level thinking tasks and projects • Students’ personal reflections and self-assessment Gottlieb, (2006)

10. Advantages of Portfolio Assessment • Promoting student self-evaluation, reflection, and critical thinking. • Measuring performance based on genuine samples of student work. • Providing flexibility in measuring how students accomplish their learning goals. • Enabling teachers and students to share the responsibility for setting learning goals and for evaluating progress toward meeting those goals. • Giving students the opportunity to have extensive input into the learning process. • Facilitating cooperative learning activities, including peer evaluation and tutoring, cooperative learning groups, and peer conferencing. • Providing a process for structuring learning in stages. • Providing opportunities for students and teachers to discuss learning goals and the progress toward those goals in structured and unstructured conferences. • Enabling measurement of multiple dimensions of student progress by including different types of data and materials. • Venn, J. J. (2000). Assessing students with special needs (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill.

11. Disadvantages of Portfolio Assessment • Requiring extra time to plan an assessment system and conduct the assessment. • Gathering all of the necessary data and work samples can make portfolios bulky and difficult to manage. (Solution: E-portfolios) • Developing a systematic and deliberate management system is difficult, but this step is necessary in order to make portfolios more than a random collection of student work. • Scoring portfolios involves the extensive use of subjective evaluation procedures such as rating scales and professional judgment, and this limits reliability. • Scheduling individual portfolio conferences is difficulty and the length of each conference may interfere with other instructional activities. • Venn, J. J. (2000). Assessing students with special needs (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill.

12. Assessment E-Portfolios can incorporate technology standards. The State Education Department. State Education Department, Office of Bilingual Education and Foreign Language Studies. (2010). Technology-enhanced instrustion for esl and bilingual education. Retrieved from University of the State of New York website: http://www.p12.nysed.gov/biling/docs/TechProjectFinal.pdf

13. By giving students the option to post their assessment portfolio online, this will expand their audience, connect them to the outside world, increase their technology skills, and most likely increase motivation to post their best work. This eliminates the disadvantage that assessment portfolios are bulky and difficult to manage. http://echucaelearning.wikispaces.com/Digital+Portfolios