Formative Assessment

Summative assessment, also called assessment of learning, usually generates a lot of anxiety on English-language learners because it measures what students have learned after a usually long period and does not allow for re-teaching and reassessing the accumulated content. Conversely, formative assessment, or assessment for learning, is aimed at measuring what students are learning bit by bit and allows for revisiting the content and reassessing the learners. However, in a context that growingly values summative, high-stakes assessment, shifting the focus from summative to formative assessment of adult learners, in a course with over 3,000 students in a traditional English-language-teaching institute, is easier said than done.

This presentation describes a project aimed at shifting a whole assessment system from a summative to a formative, outcomes-based model. While in the past adult students were assessed by way of final written and oral exams at the end of each ten-week module, nowadays they take six short assessments, perfectly aligned with the learning outcomes and instructional strategies, and are allowed to retake them if the outcomes are not met. More importantly, the new assessment instruments focus more on real-world communication than the traditional exams, more grammar-oriented.

After a general overview of the teaching context, a large ELT institute in Brazil with over 17,000 students and 260 teachers, presenters will discuss the reasons that led to the shift from summative to formative. Then they will present the steps in the implementation of the project: a) guaranteeing buy-in; b) designing the assessment system and instruments; c) piloting the project; d) mainstreaming the project, e) evaluating the results. They will share samples of the assessment instruments, with special emphasis on the oral assessments, more informal in nature than the traditional oral tests and with short checklists. They will also show the results of surveys with students and teachers on their opinion and reaction to the new assessment system, analyze teacher and student reactions during the process, and discuss the lessons learned.

Participants with leave the presentation with valuable tips on how to implement this type of major change in their institutions and a number of samples of assessment instruments, along with checklists and rubrics, that are directly aligned with learning outcomes and more communicative in nature, thus generally favoring constructed rather than selected types of responses.