Assembling and scoring tests

    Regarding assembling and scoring tests, I have to say that the aspect that call my attention the most was the following statement made by Genesee and Upshur ‘The instructions themselves should not be a test; in other words, instructions should be clear and meaningful to students’(201).

    This statement made me remember that somewhere I read that instructions are not the time to assess our students’ language ability to figure out what we expect them to do in a task. Instructions are not intended to be tricky because we are not trying to know how good our students are at solving puzzles, but our aim is to collect reliable information about students’ language abilities.

    For this reason, we should keep in mind that because of unclear instructions our students may feel frustrated and their performance would be affected.

    Furthermore, in order to succeed at giving proper instructions for tests and that those lead to the information we want to gather from our students, we have to keep in mind that instructions are our way to guide students towards a successful performance of the task. To do so, we need to be clear of what aspect of language we want our students to focus on; otherwise, they might end up doing something that does not really correspond to what we are asking them to do. Consider the following example:

    Finally, I would like to share some of the experiences I have had with instructions. I'm going to start with one that I think most of us have experienced, I have written my whole name and then figured out that I should have written my name and last name separately. I have chosen the right answer, when I was supposed to choose the wrong one. I have circled, when I should have underlined... And many of the like. Now, please share your experience with instructions or maybe with instructions you gave and your students did wrong.  

My students using learning logs and our first interview

   I am currently teaching a Tuesday to Friday two-hour class with students between 14 and 16 years old. Last week, I started to introduce them to learning logs and we had our first interview. I would like to share with you how it went.

   Firstly, I would like to mention that along with the learning logs, I am using field notes to support the outcomes of my students’ logs. The note-taking exercise has helped me a lot in keeping track of my students’ process and my teaching practices. I need to say that it has been very useful and I confirmed this when I had my first interview with them.

   After the first couple of classes, I talked to my students about the learning log and so far we are still in the trial period in which they are getting familiar with it. In their blogs, they are asked to express in the way they prefer how they felt in class, what they did and what they liked or not about that class. Although they have had a lot of doubts regarding what they should include or not, I have noticed that after the first week they became more comfortable and interested. Mostly, they have wrote a lot of good things about the class, which I’m glad to read but I’m waiting for them to open themselves more and to be able to express dislikes too.

   Since they were in the second week of classes and the mid-term exam was coming soon, I wanted to know how they thought things were going from another source different from the notes and the learning logs. So, I decided to have a short interview with them and I prepared few questions; however, I was expecting that they wanted to talk about other doubts or comments. During the interview, they first seemed surprised and expressed that they did not experienced such thing before in any of their classes (having interviews with the teacher). After the first two minutes, they seemed more comfortable and I asked them the questions I had prepared.

   As I was expecting, my students expressed concerns they had that they did not include in their learning logs but that I was noticing and writing down on my notes.

   I found this exercise very useful and the biggest advantage that I have is that I’m working with only five students, which makes things much easier. However, although I have tried to persuade my students to write things that are going right and wrong in their logs, this hasn’t happened yet. Based on this I would like to ask you:

What do you think would be a good way to make this happen?

Are you currently using journals, questionnaires and/or interviews in your class? If yes, how is it going? If not, Why not?