Annotated Assessment Exemplar

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Last year when working as a Spanish online teacher, I created an assessment for High school and Middle School students who were already proficient in the target language and needed it to move into the next course or enroll in other classes. The purpose of the assessment was to focus on one of the three areas of language learning, specifically to evaluate their speaking skills since they attended a virtual school. The school assessed the other three areas: writing, reading, and listening comprehension through the online platform.

The assessment was based on my previous years of experience working with college students. My main goal was to help learners communicate and engage in conversation in the target language. I elaborated a questionnaire with basic, intermediate, and advanced questions where students could analyze, communicate, and present information in Spanish according to the course standards. The participants needed to schedule a meeting within the first two weeks of school and demonstrate their knowledge and experience using the target language throughout topics of personal, social, and academics contexts.

Since the purpose of the assessment was to evaluate student skills and knowledge in the second language, I consider this experience a summative assessment. Most of the participants studied Spanish overseas or grow up in a Hispanic or Latin country.

Here is the assessment:

assessment-2Download

Positive connections through assessments

In the world of languages, in my perspective, the conversation is key. If I could evaluate students’ knowledge and communicate with them in the target language, I had accomplished one of my most important goals: understanding each other and overcoming language barriers. Based on this idea, I interacted with students during the assessment by utilizing real situations or including cultural aspects for a deeper connection and in order to identify their level of proficiency.

This assessment reflects theories and ideas of social constructivism since I believe that learning a second language is a process of knowledge construction where learners need to receive instruction with precise information and digest it. There is also evidence that background, age, type of school, among others, influence acquiring content and or becoming fluent in a second language. It is also important to note that learners who other teachers or families support have higher success rates and growth in any field.

In my previous post, I mentioned three things I believe about assessment, and I think the purpose of learning is more than only acquiring information, when learning a language, if we can connect and demonstrate an understanding of the culture, we have a better opportunity to interpret communication successfully. After the testing experience, my perception is that students felt more enthusiastic about continuing learning a second language and were able to recognize their own learning processes.