Alternative assessment: try it and you'll love it!

When asked to decide between traditional and new, institutionalised and alternative, I would always choose a mixture of both because I see value in established ideas, methods and suggestions, but I also think that their should be some dialectic and development. In other words, I believe in expanding and enriching existing experiences so that they may fit the new environment and vice verse, adapt the new teaching environment to include existing traditions. That is why I think it is important that English language teachers should know about alternative assessment (AA) options.

The most important aspect of alternative assessment is that it is performance based as it implements activities that reveal what students can do with language, emphasising their strengths instead of their weaknesses. This means that the teacher can adapt AA to the students and that means that the teacher can actually create the kinds of situations and challenges that the learners are most probably going to encounter in real-life communication. Most important of all is that students can evaluate their own learning and learn from the evaluation process by applying the assessment criteria their teacher has defined for them either on their own performance or on a peer’s performance. Therefore, a further positive aspect of AA is that it can foster both self-assessment and peer assessment.

Prior to choosing a particular AA instrument, a rather essential characteristic about AA in general should be focused on – AA instruments are not only designed and structured differently from traditional tests, but are also marked (graded) differently. That again implies that the teacher familiarises themselves with the various marking strategies available within the area of AA. This basically means that the teacher must pre-define the criteria according to which the assessment shall be performed and the scale according to which the assessed performance shall be evaluated. Well, the scale part is easy. Yet, it has to be pre-defined as the teacher needs to have some outcomes in mind and points to be allocated to them.

Regarding criteria, teachers should start by planning authentic content based on which the criteria will be defined. For starters, here is a list of possible authentic content that might be integrated into an AA instrument:

1. Discussion topics or issues of interest to the students provoking critical thinking and individual opinions; 
2. Audio/ video material representing real-world communication contexts and situations; 
3. Real problem solutions requiring the creative use of language rather than simple repetition. 

Such content can easily be analysed in terms of assessment criteria and there are several ways to achieve it. A possible list of criteria might include:

1. Learners produce a quality product or performance (written or spoken) based on the proposed discussion topic; 
2. Students are able to reproduce real-world dialogues based on suggested situations; 
3. Students provide independent solutions to proposed problems. 

And last but not least, the scale should be defined horizontally and vertically, meaning that each criterion is assessed and evaluated separately against a certain scale. For instance, the first criterion supplied above, assuming spoken production is expected, could be marked on a scale from 1 (the lowest mark) – 5 (the highest mark) in the following way:

1	2	3	4	5
learner produces a poor quality product as they are hardly able to state their opinion and manage to supply only one argument to substantiate it.	learner produces a product of sufficient quality as they are able to state their opinion at least remotely and manage to supply two different arguments to substantiate it.	learner produces a product of satisfactory quality by stating their opinion rather clearly and by supplying at least two different arguments to substantiate it.	learner produces a solid product by stating their opinion in coherent sentences while substantiating it with more than two solid arguments.	learner produces a high quality product by stating their opinion in coherent sentences, substantiating it with several solid arguments and linking it to a real-life example.

Personally, I am a fan of Rubistar, an AA instrument based on rubrics which can easily be used for the evaluation of both written and spoken performance. Another rather useful AA instrument is the K-W-L Chart, which I have already mentioned in my post on Skills (the section on reading comprehension). This AA instrument is based on three assessment stages as it is meant to assess ‘what the student knows’, ‘what the student wants to know’ and ‘what the student has learnt’. Both rubrics and the K-W-L chart may be implemented as self-assessment tools.

A K-W-L chart sample might look as follows:

Knows	Wants to know	Has learnt
Lincoln was important.  His face is on a penny.  He's dead now.  I think Lincoln was a  President.  He was a tall person.	Why is Lincoln  famous?  Was he a good  President?  Why is he on a  penny?  Did he have a  family?  How did he die?	Lincoln was President of the U.S.  He was the 16th President.  There was a war in America when Lincoln  was President.  He let the slaves go free.  Two of his sons died while he was still  alive.

There are other AA instruments that can easily be implemented. However, these shall be presented in a new post.