As discussed in the Introduction, language teachers have a dual role of teaching and assessing, which ultimately impacts student learning and motivation. Their assessment-related decisions serve to determine who will pass or fail a quiz, test, or course of study; whether the class is going well; and the degree of effectiveness of the teaching process (Harding & Kremmel, 2016).
Teachers will need to be able to design, carry out, and interpret a variety of different assessment approaches that have often been identified in the assessment literature as formative and summative assessments. Formative assessments are all those activities undertaken by teachers, and by their students in assessing themselves, which provide information to be used to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged (Black & William, 1998). Additionally, in Black and Williams (1998) influential study Inside the Black Box, they explain assessment is formative when: (1) it is an integral part of the learning and teaching process; and (2) assessment evidence is actually used to modify teaching to meet the needs of pupils and improve learning. However, the integration of formative assessment as a teaching-learning- assessing model has been conceived differently with practicing teachers. Formative assessments are typically thought of by teachers – and different from scholars – as those along-the-way classroom tests and activities that teachers create to help them and their students understand how well students are learning what they are supposed to learn (Popham, 2011). Popham explains that “A number of commercial vendors describe their ‘interim tests,’ or their standardized tests
administered every few months, as incarnations of ‘formative assessment’”
(http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/02/23/21popham.h30.html?t, retrieved on August 10, 2018).Thus, there is an inaccurate conception of an instructional approach that could have innumerable benefits for teaching and learning (Birenbaum, 2014). For teachers to understand the instructional approach of formative assessment, Popham (2011) more accurately labels formative assessment as the ‘formative-assessment process’. His addition of the word, process, emphasizes that formative assessment is not a stand alone assessment, but is used in conjunction with the entire procedure of using assessments for the service of learning
In contrast to formative assessments, summative assessments are regarded by many educators as the test used to make evaluative judgments about a completed instructional sequence. Thus, summative assessments can range from large-scale standardized state examinations to classroom-based tests such as end-of-unit or chapter tests and final examinations. The purpose of summative assessments is to examine the extent to which knowledge (e.g., the material covered from the curriculum) has been acquired.
Formative and summative assessments are key components to the formative and
summative assessment processes for the betterment of student learning and teachers’ pedagogy. The entire process involves decisions about when and what to assess and how to use the
information elicited to make choices about adjustments in student’s learning or a teachers’ teaching. Popham (2011) explains,
When we employ phrases such as “a formative assessment” or “a summative assessment,” we are simply being sloppy with our language. Unfortunately, many educators truly believe formative assessment refers to particular kinds of tests that will— based on ample research evidence—improve kids’ learning. This simply is not so.
(http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/02/23/21popham.h30.html?t, retrieved on August 10, 2018).
To more fully illuminate how formative and summative assessments could be used as a process for learning, I will incorporate the recently used terms in the assessment literature: Assessment- for-Learning and Assessment-of-Learning. (I include the hyphenation and italics for ease of reading.) The definition of Assessment-for-Learning emerged from the first International Symposium on Assessment (2001) in which the term was defined as the following:
Assessment for Learning is formative assessment plus the deep involvement of learners in the assessment process. It is a process of both learners and teacher being engaged in seeing and interpreting evidence to figure out where learners are in their learning in relation to what has been taught, where they need to go next in their learning and how best to get there. The processes that support this work include having clear learning goals, co-constructing criteria around quality and success, engaging in all forms of feedback for learning (self-assessment, peer assessment, feedback from others), collecting evidence of learning and using information to guide the next learning steps. (as cited in, Davies, Busick, Herbst, & Sherman, 2014, p. 568)
Assessment-of-Learning and Assessment-for-Learning “are aligned with different
outcome responses (p. 857)” coined by Bourke and Mentis (2013) as feedback and feedforward. Feedback is given to students after summative assessment, while feedforward is attributed to formative assessment. Feedback, explained by Bourke and Mentis (2013), is provided to students to show their achievements or failures on a task or knowledge of a particular area of content, and is seen as product-oriented. In contrast, feedforward is anticipatory in that it provides students with focused information that they can use in the next steps of the task, for future learning, or for
specific outcomes (Hattie & Timperley, 2017). Bourke and Mentis (2013) argue that feedforward is an approach that “all students benefit from” (p. 857). Thus, with Assessment-of-Learning and Assessment-for-Learning, language teachers need to be aware that the assessment practices that they choose will have an influence on students’ learning and motivation. Researchers have shown that when teachers use Assessment-for-Learning, students learn more and teaching becomes more effective (Andrade, 2013; McMillan, 2013). Although, as stated above, formative and summative assessments are used by the majority of scholars, Popham (2011), tallied the number of studies supporting Assessment-for-Learning at more than 4000 adding to the evidence that this is no longer a new way of thinking (Shepard, 2000).
Additionally, depending on factors such as the part of the world in which language teachers are operating (e.g., country), language being taught, program type, teacher background, and learner aspirations, language teachers need to understand that their instructional efforts take place within a broader societal context and curriculum. For example, the broader societal context and curriculum may influence or be influenced by high-stakes exams (e.g., district, state, or federal/national levels), or large-scale language standards (e.g., Common European Framework of Reference – CEFR).
External standards are an important part of a teacher’s professional life, and often play a role in the development of language curricula. One influential set of standards is the CEFR. The CEFR is meant to overcome communication issues among professionals working in the field of modern languages arising from the different educational systems in Europe (CEFR, 2018). The creators of the CEFR identified the communicative objectives and co-constructed different levels ranging from Level A1 (identified as “breakthrough”) to Level C2 (identified as “mastery”). From the CEFR, curricula and syllabi have been created and then distributed to teachers. The
CEFR is intended to serve as a set of external standards to help empower teachers (and, to a certain extent, learners) to set individualized goals, monitor and assess performance on learning tasks, and make decisions about the steps learners need to make for progress.
With the many different decisions language teachers must face in their day-to-day lives, there has been a growing concern among those involved in the outcomes of assessment decisions to assist in the development of teachers’ language assessment literacy.