Two relevant principles

At the moment we are going to assess our students we as teachers must be aware that the importance of the integration of skills is the paramount importance in language learning, as cited by brown (2003). When these skills are integrated, assessment is more authentic and provides more washback.

When students would be assessed it’s really important to set a contrast between student’s competence and student’s performance. Brown (2004) “When you propose to assess someone ´s ability in one or a combination of the four skills, you assess one person’s competence, but you observe the person´s performance”. Sometimes the performance doesn´t indicate true competence: rest, illness or emotional distraction, text anxiety, a memory block or other reliability factors could affect student’s performance,  thereby providing an unreliable  measure of actual competence.

Brown (2003) cited two important principles:  the first one is to consider the fallibility of the results of a single performance; it means that you as a teacher have the obligation to consider at least two or (more performances) and/ or contexts before drawing conclusions.  Multiple measures will give you a more reliable and valid assessment than a single measure.

The second one is observable performance, it means being able to see or hear the performance of the learner, but in this case you are not going to observe the listening performance, what you are going to see is the results of the listening. The listening performance itself is the process of is the invisible, inaudible process of internalizing meaning from the auditory signals being transmitted to ear and brain, so this product  is within  the structure of the brain.

A wrong concept

Nowadays many of the teachers that have been educating for years have a wrong concept of what evaluation and assessment is. They just think that both involve grades and mean the same thing but these concepts are more than grading students and deciding whether they should pass or not.

 Assessment is a continuous process that involves many aspects that affect student´s learning directly. Genesee & Upshur (1996) explains that assessment consists of three essential components; the first one is information that may be gathered through observation of students´ behavior in the classroom, by students´ comments during individual conferences or from entries in students´ journals. After gathering this information, the second component is interpretation, and the last one is decision making in order to decide what actions to take or what changes to make to instruction. 

 Talking about the last component of assessment, relevant aspects about educational decision making are the strategies used by the teacher at the moment students would be assessed. According to Brissenden and Slater, teachers should manipulate the kinds of learning that takes place, it means if they used assessment strategies that focus only on recall knowledge the result would be superficial learning, but if they choose assessment strategies that demand critical thinking or problem solving the result would be completely different, the level of students´ performance or achievement would be higher. To sum up assessment is a process that takes place everywhere and takes into account important factors that affect students a such as attitude, behavior, needs, learning style and strategies.