Faculty of English Language & Literature, National & Kapodistrian

University of Athens
Programme in Applied Linguistics

Testing and Assessment

Lec 2
Faculty of English Language & Literature, National & Kapodistrian
University of Athens
Programme in Applied Linguistics

? Is testing a
‘good’ or a
‘bad’ thing ?
 Is testing a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’
thing?
 Language educators (and not only) are
divided into two camps: the teachers and
the testers.
 Teachers often say things like:
 Let's learn to teach before we learn to test
 We deal with people, testers deal with
statistics.
 Testers think that teachers
 tend to be unspecific about their aims
and objectives
 Are disinterested in finding out whether
goals and objectives have been met
 Can we do without
teaching or testing?
Probably yes because
 learning can occur in spite of
teaching and/or
testing, despite any kind of formal
evaluation
 the outcomes of teaching can be
assessed without any form of testing
 testing may be used to measure
what people already know
Is testing synonymous
with the terms below?
 Evaluation
 Evaluation may focus on the
effectiveness or impact of a program
of instruction, examination or project.
Students are usually not asked to
evaluate while teachers carry out or
take part in evaluation only in some
contexts. ‘Experts’ or the authorities
are most commonly legitimized to carry
out formal evaluation
 Measurement
 Measurement is the process of
determining the amount or length
of something when compared with
a fixed unit (e.g. using a ruler to
measure length).
 In language teaching measurement
constitutes the quantification of
language proficiency. Aspects of
language knowledge, specific
abilities and skills are measurable
when there are transparent criteria
and precise analysis of data.
Is assessment synonymous with
testing?
 No, it is not.

 Assessment is a more encompassing term than testing.

 It is the process of gathering, interpreting, and

sometimes recording and using information about
students' responses to an educational task in order to
provide the next learning step.

 Assessment is primarily concerned with providing

teachers and/or students with feedback information.

 In language teaching, it is a local or global procedure

though which one can appraise one or more aspects of
language proficiency.

 Assessment is transparent when clear assessment

criteria have been predetermined.
Is there one form of
assessment?
 There are different forms of assessment,
including:
 Formative assessment
 Summative assessment
 Self-assessment
 Peer assessment
 Which are the most common forms of
assessment?
Continuous assessment refers to the
activities required by students
during the conduct of a course. It
takes place within the normal
teaching period and contributes to
the final assessment.
 Which are the most common forms of
assessment?

 Formative assessment refers to

observations which allow one to
determine the degree to which
students know or are able to perform
a given task. It involves all those
activities (assigned by teachers and
performed by students) which provide
information used as feedback so that
teaching may meet students’ needs.
It can also include teacher
assessment, feedback and feed-
 Which are the most common forms of
assessment?

Summative assessment is usually carried

out at the conclusion of a unit or units
of instruction, activity or plan, in order
to assess acquired knowledge and skills
at that particular point in time. It
usually serves the purpose of giving a
grade or making a judgment about the
students’ achievements in the course.
Are there other forms
of assessment?
 Less frequent but increasingly important forms
are:
 Self-assessment occurs when an appraisal
instrument is self-administered for the specific
purpose of providing performance feedback,
diagnosis and prescription recommendations
rather than a pass/fail decision. Students engage
in a systematic review of their progress and
achievement, usually for the purpose of
improvement. It may involve comparison with an
exemplar, success criteria, or other criteria. It may
also involve critiquing one's own work or a
description of the achievement obtained.
 Peer assessment occurs when students judge one
another's work on the basis of reference criteria.
This can occur using a range of strategies. The
peer assessment process needs to be taught and
students need to be supported by opportunities
to practice it regularly in a supportive and safe
(classroom) environment.
Does assessment
include testing?
 Yes, it does.

 Testing is a particular kind of assessment which

focuses on eliciting a specific sample of
performance. The implication of this is that in
designing a test we construct specific tasks
that will elicit performance from which we can
make the inferences we want to make about
the characteristics of students, groups or
individuals.
How do
we test?
 There are different sorts of testing,
including:
 Achievement testing
 Communicative testing
 Competence testing
 Diagnostic testing
 Integrative testing
 Performance testing
 Progress testing
 Proficiency testing
 Psychometric testing
Which kind of testing is
the most common?
 Achievement testing. It is used to determine whether
or not students have mastered the course content
and how they should proceed. The content of
achievement tests, which are commonly given at the
end of the course, is generally based on the course
syllabus or the course textbook.
 Progress testing. It is used at various stages
throughout a language course to determine
learners’ progress up to that point and to see what
they have learnt.
 Proficiency testing. It is used to measure learners’
general linguistic knowledge, abilities or skills without
reference to any specific course.
 Some proficiency tests are intended to show whether
students or people outside the formal educational
system have reached a given level of general language
ability.
 Others are designed to show whether candidates have
sufficient ability to be able to use a language in some
specific area such as medicine, tourism etc. Such tests
are often called Specific Purposes tests.
Which kind of testing is
the least common?
 Diagnostic testing, which seeks to identify those
areas in which a student needs further help.
These tests can be fairly general, and show, for
example, whether a student needs particular
help with one of the four language skills; or
they can be more specific, seeking to identify
weaknesses in a student’s use of grammar.
 Psychometric testing, which is aimed at
measuring psychological traits such as
personality, intelligence, aptitude, ability,
knowledge, skills which makes specific
assumptions about the nature of the ability
tested (e.g. that it is unidimensional and
normally distributed). It includes a lot of
discrete point items.
 What do
tests do?
 What a test will appraise or measure depends on what testers wish to
know and what the testers believe a test to be. There is indeed a
difference between:
 Competence testing, which is used to measure candidates’ acquired
capability to understand and produce a certain level of foreign
language, defined by phonological, lexical grammatical, sociolinguistic
and discourse constituents. In order to make test- takers’ competence
measurable and visible, testers turn of necessity to their actual
performance which may indicate their competence.
 Performance testing, which includes direct, systematic observation of an
actual student performance or examples of student performances and
rating of that performance according to pre- established performance
criteria. Students are assessed on the result as well as the process
engaged in a complex task or creation of a product. / A performance
test measures performance on tasks requiring the application of
learning in an actual or simulated setting. Either the test stimulus, the
desired response, or both are intended to lend a high degree of realism
to the test situation.
Do all language tests
aim at measuring
communicative
competence?
 No. They may test aspects of language
knowledge and skills which are considered to
be indicators of communicative
competence.
 So, are all types of tests ‘communicative’?
 Tests identified as ‘communicative’ are those
which are interaction-based, open-ended (that
is, responses cannot be predicted as in natural
communicative environments), authentic,
behavior-based and so on.
 Communicative tests are supposed to
measure communicative competence
which includes:
 linguistic competence
 sociolinguistic competence
 strategic competence
Do tests test one or many
things at a time?
 There are two different types of tests:
 Integrative tests, which include activities
that assess skills and knowledge in an
integrated manner (e.g., reading and
writing, listening and speaking). Less
attention is paid to specific
lexicogrammatical points.
 Discrete point tests, which contain items
that ideally reveal the candidate's ability
to handle one level of language and one
element of receptive or productive skills.
For whom are tests
important?
 For almost all the people involved in the
education process:
 the learner who wants to know how well
s/he is doing, and also wants the
'piece of paper for professional and
education purposes
 the teacher wants to know how the learner is
progressing and whether and how well s/he
herself is succeeding in his job
 the parents, who want to make sure that
they’re getting their money’s worth
 educational authorities and others who
have some interest in the learner's
progress or his/her proficiency level
 the potential employer who relies heavily on
what tests tell him/her about learner
proficiency levels
Why else is testing
important?
 Because of its backwash effect

 What does this mean? It is the effect that testing

has on teaching. For better or worse, tests and
exams exert control over what goes on in
classrooms. This is because very many
language classes are geared more or less
directly to the tests or examinations the learners
will end up taking. Teachers must often 'teach
to' a test.

 Is the quality of tests important for teaching?

Yes.
 If the test is a bad one (or the teacher is too
narrow in his/her interpretation of it), the
result may be negative washback, where we
can say that teaching suffers because of the
test coming at the end of the course.
 If the test is a good one, and its nature well
understood by the teacher, the effect on the
 Considerations when
constructing a test

 There are two basic considerations when constructing a test. It

must be valid and reliable. The first concept first:

 Validity is commonly defined as 'the extent to which [a test]

measures what it is supposed to measure and nothing else. If a
test is valid, the outsider who looks at an individual's score
knows that it is a true reflection of the individual's skill in the
area the test claims to have covered.
Kinds of
validity
 Content validity. A test is said to have content
validity if the items or tasks of which it is made up
constitute a representative sample of items or tasks
for the area of knowledge or ability to be tested
(often related to a syllabus or a course).
 Construct validity. A test is said to have construct
validity if the scores that a candidate gets on this
relate in the same way to another test or form of
assessment for the same aspect of knowledge.
 Empirical validity. A measure of the validity of a test
arrived at by comparing the test with one or more
criterion measures.
 Face validity. The extent to which a test appeals to
candidates or to those choosing it on behalf of the
candidates because it is considered to be an
acceptable measure of the ability they wish to
measure. It is sometimes referred to as ‘test appeal’.
 Predictive validity. A type of validity based on the
degree to which a test accurately predicts future
performance. A language aptitude test for example,
should have predictive validity because the results
of the test should predict the ability to learn a
foreign language.
Important consideration in
testing
 Reliability is another very important
consideration when testing.
 Relibility refers to the consistency of a test. That
is, if every time the test is administered it will
have the same outcome. But reliability does not
have to do with the content of the test alone; it
has to do with marking in two ways:
 ensuring that different raters give
comparable marks to the same script
 the same raters give the same marks
on two different occasions to the
same script
Kinds of
reliability
Reliability is most often estimated with regard to:

 The internal consistency in a test; that is, if

there is correlation among the variables
comprising the test

 The results when testing and re-testing; that is,

if there is correlation between two (or more)
administrations of the same item, scale, or
instrument for different times, locations, or
populations, when the two administrations do
not differ in other relevant variables

 Inter-rater reliability, which refers to the level of

agreement between two or more evaluators/
judges/ raters on a particular instrument at a
particular time. They are to apply their marks
in a manner that is predictable and replicable.
Therefore, note that inter- rater reliability is a
property of the testing situation, and not of the
More about tests and
testing

 How does one define what will be

tested?
 How can tests and feedback
provided be a positive asset in the
educational process?
 What types of feedback can
teachers provide to test- takers and
how?
 Are tests the best tools for
evaluation and assessment?
 What are the most important things to
remember about raters and marking
(closed and open-ended items) in
integrative and discrete point tests?
Statements about feedback: True or false?
 The fact that the teacher gives feedback on student
performance implies a power hierarchy: the
teacher above, the student below.
 Assessment is potentially humiliating to the
assessed person.
 Teachers should give their students only positive
feedback, in order to encourage, raise confidence and
promote feelings of success; negative feedback
demoralizes.
 Giving plenty of praise and encouragement is
important for the fostering of good teacher-student
relationships.
 Very frequent approval and praise lose their
encouraging effect; and lack of praise may then be
interpreted as negative feedback.
 Teachers should not let students correct each
other's work, as this is harmful to their
relationships.