Can an Assessment Give a Valid Evaluation of a Student?

3021 Words7 Pages

As Jones (1979,p.50) believed that “ by following established procedures,it is possible to design a format for administering and scoring a valid and reliable language performance test”. However, it seems to be an exceedingly simplified opinion of performance testing given the complication of validity as well as reliability problems in assessment. Alderson et al. mention (2001) that someone can impossibly produce a good test or a good item. The writer realizes which item is focused on the test and find it uneasy to understand that in fact it can be testing either something different or addition to which is being concentrated. Additionally, Lado (1961) no test is a perfect measure, so it is always an important responsibility for testing researchers, teachers as well as markers to know how to design a test which assesses the best abilities of candidates. There are many issues involved in performance assessment and particularly validity, reliability, authenticity and backwash effects have made language testers as well as educators concern them. In regards, it is the purpose of commentary to briefly discuss validity, reliability, authenticity and backwash issues and then the given writing task with approaches described in it will be analyzed following these features above and some solutions to improve the effect and quality of this writing task will be also proposed in this essay. Finally, there are some main arguments and conclusions in the context of assessment.

1. Discussion on aspects of the writing task

The target of this writing task is to assess the basic writing skill of 95 teenage students,who are demanded to think about an occasion when they travel somewhere on a very long journey.

Look at traditional validities in most...

... middle of paper ...

...n the writing test , but one of them also contributes the success of the quality test.

Conclusion

The teachers need to know how background their students are and their cultural environment and before force them to do an exercise, the teacher should help students spending some experience. That’s why it will help students’ writitng more relibale and authentic writing. There are some main strengths and weakness of the item and the marking approaches,indicate main backwash effect. Another concern is that circumanstance related the test should be supplied because it will help tester to define the directions and also influence on the efficacy of the writing test. Finaly, the purpose of the test must be clear and linked to the target of the course syllabus. The results of the scores will reflect student’s knowledge and it is important to give feedback to student to help

Open Document