Assessment
April 13, 2013
This post is a comment that will be published in an upcoming article on 21st century skills and assessment in The Language Educator, the bimonthly publication of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Multiple choice was the death of critical thinking. Multiple choice questions train students to look at problems in one […]
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April 5, 2013
One of my top two most widely-used ideas ever is abandoning homework in favor of a weekly “fluency” activity involving a whole lot of student choice. [Incidentally, the other is the YouTube commercial cloze quizzes – in 2.5 years about 60 teachers have joined this project.] Basically, the concept is that instead of you assigning students […]
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April 2, 2013
Reporting like kindergarten
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My daughter is in preschool and actually takes tests and gets a report card. Her tests consist of her teacher asking her to cut or draw something or identify letters or colors. When I get her “report card” it tells me whether she is satisfactorily completing a series of developmental and cognitive tasks like “counts […]
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February 5, 2013
More than two years ago, I wrote a popular post about one of the activities my students do instead of homework, free-topic blogging. In the past month I’ve received a flurry of requests for information on how I grade student blogs, specifically what rubric I use to grade them. Clearly, the idea continues to gain […]
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January 30, 2013
Spot-checking conversations
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In order to learn how to converse with someone, students need to hear conversations, plan conversations, and participate in conversations. So, if we’re giving students a lot of opportunities for interpersonal communication in class, which we should, how do we grade these conversations? Don’t grade. My first bit of advice is to resist the temptation […]
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September 30, 2008
Think you can’t know if students understand without them giving you translations (or you providing them)? See if this presentation can change your mind. Tips on why and how we should be assessing comprehension without English in the world language classroom. This presentation was given at the Kentucky World Language Association’s fall 2008 conference in […]
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