Reflection on the Evaluation course

By Sebastin Prez
Prof. Edgar Picn
Escuela de Idiomas
niversidad de !ntio"uia
Before taking this course I had the vague idea that language frameworks were a
fixed consensus by policy makers to have language standards in a certain
population. Its theoretical underpinnings were therefore not totally clear to me.
When being exposed to a comparison between some of the language models that
support different conceptions of what it means to know a language, I came to
realize that depending on this theory support, the language frameworks and
consequently the assessment conception would also be affected.
etting to elaborate this relationship myself has been paramount in my
development as a teacher. It has allowed me to conceive assessment procedures
not !ust as a preference choice, but as the alignment of my teaching principles with
the actual assessment practices that constitute a big part of my way of teaching. I
feel now more empowered as a teacher when I choose between the late model of
Bachman and "almer or the one by #elce$%urcia et al. &'()*, depending on my
teaching and assessing purposes.
+nother contribution from this course has been to provide me with a wide variety
of elements relating to the multiplism perspective in language assessment. ,his
range of alternatives are now not only a matter of including different learning
styles, but also multiple definitions on language use and procedures for measuring,
and more importantly- the multiple purposes of the assessment practices. +mong
the latter, the use of assessment procedures to improve my students. learning has
been a paramount achievement for me in this course, allowing me to use these
procedures for formative purposes and for holding my students accountable.
,he above$mentioned theoretical discoveries have offered me practical elements
that can support my process of developing my own assessment procedures as an
/nglish teacher. I feel this support especially in terms of the improved fairness and
wider inclusion that my assessment practices are now able to provide. In this
sense, the fact that some of my students have any difficulties in any of the skills
that make up a particular language competence will not mean anymore that they
will have low grades when unable to cope with learning obstacles. I will therefore
be able to reevaluate my practices on the go and to make modifications so the
lower achieving students with some of my teaching and assessing procedures can
also have an opportunity to scaffold on their learning difficulties.
,he experience of creating a rubric and sharing its different development stages
with both classmates and the teacher has been very enriching. 0aving been
exposed myself to the design of rubrics. I have to admit that although I was able to
comply with the requirements of the program I teach at, I only did so by
borrowing different elements from rubrics models or by accepting suggestions
with !ust an authority argument. ,his shared experience of commenting every
single step in he process of creating a rubric has given me the elements and
confidence to make my own decisions when designing one or to check if it is
really serving the purpose I want it to.
,his collaborative construction of assessment procedures made me realize issues
that I had not considered before in my practices, such as the validity and the
reliability my assessment instruments should account for. ,o this regard, being
aware of factors that could possibly alter the consistency of the results I get with
an assessment procedure have warned me of the risks it could entail and pointed to
some possible strategies to overcome the associated barriers. %oreover, when it
comes to validity issues, my professor.s comments on my classmates. attempts
and mine helped reposition myself as an assessment designer and notice that not
we were not always assessing what we intended to. ,his realization I see also as
one ma!or contribution that will assist me in bringing fairness and a sound
rationale to my assessment practices.