View Content #22949

By Lindsay Marean, CASLS InterCom Editor

When I was a beginning high school Spanish teacher I did not care about assessment. I wanted my students to learn, and I believed that quality learning experiences and student engagement were the keys to learning. Grades keep students accountable for staying on task, I thought, and then I stopped thinking about it.

As it turns out, people who do care about assessment have the same concern that I did: student learning. In our first Topic of the Week article this year, CASLS director Julie Sykes wrote, “Assessment is fundamentally about learning and improvement. Reflection and feedback are at the core of the assessment process” (Sykes 2017). Deborah Blaz writes, “Assessment may be defined as ‘any method used to better understand the current knowledge that student possesses’” (Blaz 2001:2).

By backgrounding assessment, I deprived my students of the opportunity to connect their classroom experiences with their progress in proficiency, and I deprived myself of a powerful tool for designing learning experiences. Let’s take a critical look at one of my favorite activities back then: Mixer Bingo. In its most structured form, I prepared cards ahead of time with different potential facts about a person, as described here (icebreakers.ws 2017). Often I simplified the prep by telling students to circulate and have short conversations about something topical, such as “What did you do over the weekend?” Upon finishing a conversation, students sign each other’s cards and move on to the next person.

I knew that I had to make students accountable to keep them engaged, so I circulated around the room and listened in or participated in conversations myself. As a follow-up, I called out student names at random and gave prizes to students who could make a Bingo.  Students participated willingly in the task and interacted in Spanish. I held students accountable, and they were engaged, but assessment of student learning was missing from the picture.

What did students learn? They practiced asking about and telling where they went and what they did (prototypical Novice Mid Interpersonal indicators on the NCSSFL-ACTFL Global Can-Benchmarks (ACTFL 2015)), but how did they do? Did they all give the same 2-3 answers, or did they collectively use a wide range of vocabulary? Were their conversations cursory, or did they truly listen and respond to each other? Were their questions well-formed and easy to understand? In the future I can discuss components of a good conversation ahead of time, and then as a follow-up have students reflect on how well they did with each component. Ideally students could record one of their interactions on a mobile device, and then upload the recording along with their reflection to a tool such as LFO to Go.

What did I incentivize? By asking students to fill in as many squares on the grid as possible in a given time, I encouraged them to have the fastest, most superficial conversations possible. By reflecting on what my assessable learning goals for the task are, rather than what my accountability measures will be, I can re-tool the task in a way that encourages student growth. If I want conversations to be more in-depth, with follow-up questions, I can make a 3 X 3 grid rather than 5 X 5. If I want students to use more breadth of vocabulary, then I can have students write down the activity their partner did over the weekend, not just their name. Then I can stipulate that each square must have a different activity. A sample conversation with these modifications might look like this:

To truly get information about what my students know how to do, I can ask them. As a whole class, I can ask for the most unusual answers that students heard. We can discuss the areas where people ran into difficulties communicating and what we can do to improve in those areas. I can also ask individual students to fill out a quick questionnaire. And finally, if we’re using a tool like LinguaFolio Online, I can listen to the interactions that my students recorded, read their reflections, and provide my own feedback.

When I care about assessment, I think about my objectives and assessment before I set my students to do a task. The result is that my task changes to maximize student learning gains, and that students can clearly see the connection between their efforts in class and their growth in proficiency. I used to keep my students engaged through accountability. Now we can all stay engaged through meaningful assessment of our growth.

References

American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (2015). NCSSFL-ACTFL Can-Do Statements: Performance Indicators for Language Learners. Available from https://www.actfl.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/Can-Do_Statements_2015.pdf.

Blaz, Deborah (2001). A Collection of Performance Tasks and Rubrics. Larchmont, NY: Eye on Education.

icebreakers.ws (2017). Human Bingo (Did You Know?) Game. Available from http://www.icebreakers.ws/large-group/did-you-know-bingo.html.

Sykes, J. (2017). The Top 12 List. CASLS InterCom. Available from http://caslsintercom.uoregon.edu/content/22390.