Alternative Perspectives to Assessments

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(By clicking on this button, you can also listen to this post.)

Has our view on assessments changed slightly compared to last week?

This is a continuation of the thought I presented last week on snapping out of traditional assessments.

Traditional assessments might be easy to quantify, and less demanding administratively, but they do lose their essence most of the time.

Let us consider a very popular form of assessment — The LSRWV.

For those who are not well versed with LSRWV. It is an abbreviation for Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, and Viewing.

The LSRWV is comparatively wholesome compared to the ‘only’ Writing (traditional) form of assessments.

Today, let us just focus on the ‘L’ from the LSRWV.

Here is a sample of a typical listening form of assessment.

Listen to the following audio and answer the following questions:

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Q1. What was the colour of the tree?

a. Green b. Red c. Yellow d. Purple

So on and so forth…

Before we proceed any further, I would present my views both as an educator and as a learner throughout the article.

Now as an educator, I find grading MCQs easy. The answers are fixed and the correction process is not time taking. But when I wear a learner’s hat, I feel an unfair treatment. I feel that the purpose of a listening assessment is to check if I am a good listener or not. But, by solving a few MCQs, does it really give clarity on my listening candidature?

What about giving me options to assess if my listening skills are good.

Now, as an educator, I present to you a few methods to assess the listening candidature of a learner.

The audio can be the same for all learners. But the method they want to present their understanding can be their decision.

First, let us talk about the type of audios we select for assessments.

The most boring one would be an informative audio presentation, where the narrator bombards you with information. A learner would only listen to this if their marks or grades are associated with this activity. Whether any learner would listen to this with enthusiasm and willingness is debatable.

But we do have the option of providing the learner with many other types of audio.

We can present the learners with songs (or rhymes) based on their age group. A short story is always an option. With the changing trends, the inclusion of podcasts will eventually become inevitable.

What can be given in an audio format might have many other possibilities, but the crucial question is ‘how to assess?’.

After listening, the learners can be given an option to present their understanding in any form that they feel most comfortable with.

A song’s essence or understanding can be represented as a painting, a dance form, a mime, or even a written summary of the audio.

When a learner represents his/her understanding through a painting or a drawing, how would it be assessed?

The parameters to check in the art piece for the understanding of the learner would be — whether or not the learner has covered all crucial aspects of the song; has the theme of the song been covered in the painting?

Let us take the example of the song ‘My favourite things’ by Julie Andrews.

This song represents what her favourite things are and how they comfort her when something unpleasant happens. A painting or a drawing representing comfort and the items representing comfort are enough proof that the learner has listened to the song, and, has, in fact, understood the mood of the song.

Let us take another example. Let’s take a short story as an audio presentation given to learners.

We can give them a portion of the story to listen to. It could include all the characters and the scene setup, and a progression of the character arc. The assessment could be for the learners to give an ending to the story.

This ending cannot be tangential to the given facts, or the character cannot be changed, and a few more limitations can be conversed about before beginning the assessment.

If the learner has not heard the story properly, they would not be able to give it a logical and creative ending.

Let us take the famous ‘Tortoise and Hare’ story.

If the learners have heard till the point where the hare goes to sleep and time passes by, they could come up with various endings, some of which could be that — the hare woke up at the last minute, and put in extra efforts to reach the final line; or, the tortoise also took a little bit of rest, but, continued slowly and won the race.

And the possibilities are endless.

It is needless to say that I took the example of the story of the ‘Tortoise and Hare’ because everyone has read it, I assume.

But a story with more characters and plots can be used to assess learners based on their age level.

These were just two such examples that I covered, which would be different from traditional assessment methods for assessing listening as a skill.

If you do have any more methods for assessing listening as a skill, do write to us at connections@ed-equity.org.

\We will meet again to discuss other forms of assessments, and their method of implementation that is modern.