Tag Archives: testing

Standardized Learning

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One conclusion I’ve come to after years teaching – testing and assessment are poorly used as a way for students to learn.

This is curious and unfortunate because students for the most part DO get motivated and energized through tests and quizzes. The pickle is, the way they are designed doesn’t make the test a learning experience and rather is meant to trick students.  I’m calling for all teachers to review the way they test and I’m offering one example using the popular convention of testing – multiple choice questions.

I recently began one of my classes after the New Year by writing the following on the board. A typical, 3 truths / 1 lie activity where students try to guess the lie.

This new year I resolve to ….

1.  grow my hair long

2. plan my classes better

3.  travel the world and teach

4.  get a new coffee maker

It’s a great activity for teachers to share themselves and also for students to do and allow the teacher to get to know them. However, I’m teaching teachers so I took this opportunity to go beyond the activity and ask them what this multiple choice question might say about assessment and how we decide design these questions.

What’s remarkable about this question is that you can pose it two ways.  One – which statement is the lie?   Two – which 3 statements are the truth?   Now you might think this is just semantics but I believe if we created multiple choice, standardized assessments where the students were asked to not choose just one right answer but  three right answers – they’d learn a lot more. They’d be encountering a lot of “right” knowledge and not trying to side step through a labyrinth of wrong.

Here’s another example.

A typical standardized multiple choice question for language students might be;

Beth ___________ to the store every day.

a) has   b) is    c)  went    d) liked

A multiple choice test that would actually give students more success and help them learn would be them choosing the 3 appropriate language forms.

Beth ________ to the store every day.

a)  went      b) likes    c) goes   d) has gone

It’s important that students choose 3 right answers and not be asked to choose the 1 wrong answer. This way, we can give marks for right answers. This way they feel “success”.

This is just one of many ways we could rethink assessment and make it more about “learning” and less about tricking students. Do you have any other ways?

PS.  The 3 correct resolutions for this year are 2,3,4!

Top 5 Game/quiz generators

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juiceThe “Top” games series continues! It seems the categories are limitless…..

Today, I’d like to tackle “Game generators”. A game generator is a site or program that makes it easy for a teacher or student to make a game. (and I mention student because the optimum way to use a generator for language learning is getting students to make the games). Game generators can be elaborate or simple, they can be plain or full of sparkles. But what counts at the end of the day is that they function well and don’t take up a lot of the teacher’s/student’s time (nor have a sharp learning curve).

So here are the Top (free) generators as I see them….

1. Fling the Teacher. This game is super easy but generates a powerfully attractive and addictive game. Just add questions and answers/possible answers. Here’s an example. One of many on our Games page of EFL Classroom 2.0

2. QuizBreak. Brought to you by CLEAR (Univ. of Michigan’s – Center for Language Education and Research), it makes a Jeopardy style quiz game with the possibility of all kinds of multi media inserts. Works well and makes an attractive game. Will store your game permanently (you can’t download). Read my full review.

3. ESLVideo. This site allows you to make quick quizzes using Youtube videos. Students can share, teachers can embed the quizzes. Students email the results to teachers for tracking. It’s been around a long time but is still keeping up with the times!

4. QuizStar. Makes a very attractive quiz with photos/audio that you can show your students afterwords. Tracking of student answers and reporting is possible too. The drawback is that you need to assign a class / create a class. There is no fully public version. But the 4Teachers.org does a great job offering tools to teachers (like Rubistar).

5. Purpose Games. This site has been around a long while and developed well. Teachers can create very attractive interactive games (see this sample) and is especially effective for vocabulary. No registration except if you want to make a game.

Next up - Paid quiz generators and random generators!

The Competitive Side of Schooling

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OlympRaceStart-01 Having recent stepped back from teaching, I’m starting to see the forest for the trees and been thinking a lot about the “competitive” nature of our classrooms, our schools and our western educational systems.

First off, I’m not a warm and fuzzy “humanist”, asserting that we shouldn’t measure or mark students. Not at all. Competition is healthy if done without long lasting “selfish” and negative consequences, if done for the benefit of learning. That said, I do find some very disturbing things about how we line up and race students down the learning path. This has been my experience and here are a few of my observations.

1. The race is to the quick?

How come we make learning into a sprint? Why not a marathon? Why not off track or even against yourself? What I mean is, we chunk up learning into discrete units of time and space, usually a few weeks or months. Students memorize and “learn” in a short period of time. We then say they have “learned”. We then say who has won, who gets the ribbons and who is “dumb”. But what have they won? And what about the students who learn over time, the hedgehogs and late bloomers? Why should we look at learning only through a short time frame and in terms of learning having an expiration date?

2. Teaching to the top.

The competitive nature of our education system, our labeling and grading, our ranking and judging of students – creates a hierarchy. And one of the most severe consequences of this, is so many teachers without clothes. Meaning, teachers teaching to the high end, to the audience that is listening/responding. They really and truly have no clothes though – unaware that so many others are left along the road, not really learning and yet still afraid to tell the teacher they have no clothes (for they aren’t teaching those that truly need it, the others at the top will learn nevertheless and sometimes inspite of the teacher). Why do we continue to teach to the top and create schools where only the “top” fit in?

assessment cartoon3. Values out the door – dog eat dog.

When we mark a student and compare students, aren’t we making education into one giant scramble up the intellectual garbage heap? Is that the end game and role of education – to create individuals who are constantly comparing themselves, ranking themselves against others? Supremism / Superiorism / Elitism / Cliquism seems to be the end result, along with a lot of individuals laid to waste along this road. Why must there be failures for others to succeed? Who ever said it should be so?

4. Intellectual Grandiosis

This is the disease that our competitive education system holds up as a sign of health. Why must the end goal of all education, from kindergarten to university, be the creation of a being that counts only from the neck up? So asked Ken Robinson. I totally agree. Why should the race just be along the path of facts and books and rationalism? Why don’t we value our quirky ones, or our athletes, or our very empathetic and kind students? Is not empathy something we learn and should value? Why do we worship the rotting library of academia?

5. Knowing More Does Not Mean Understanding More.

Our students “know” and the competitive system assures so. However, that doesn’t equate to understanding nor even the enacting and proper use of this knowledge. There are many students who do intuitively understand and who we don’t value because they can’t explain it. Why should we equate “winning” with being able to explain? We undervalue and undermine the great force of intuition and wisdom in our competitive market place.

5. Institutionalized Powerlessness

We value human beings by how many years of competitive schooling they’ve had. X number of years and you have it made, you are of the “powerful”. You’ve climbed to the top and are given “value” for such. But what about those who’ve learned by themselves, who gained knowledge while on the toilet or from the tube or their Toshiba laptop? Who is the great decider that tells who should go left and others go right? Isn’t our educational system to blame? How we consign people to failure not based on merit but solely because they didn’t run the educational race?

Just a few thoughts about how competitive education has become. We make it so, to our detriment.

I hope the next blog post, to outline some ways teachers can be subversive and help all students with as little labeling as possible.

The #1……(way to formally assess students)

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Number One** Not your ordinary, endless list – just what’s number 1.

The Rubric!

The rubric is a very transparent and accountable way to assess students. It is a grid where you clearly show students “what criteria they will be assessed by” and “what levels or indicators the teacher will look for”. It communicates to students clear expectations on the part of the teacher. Here’s a nice example of a rubric which the teacher adapted from the SOLOM – a standard speaking proficiency rubric.

There are 2 main ways to use a rubric.


1. Make it with the students. Yes, have a conference and ask the students to list the things that they should do well in the task/activity/unit/language that they are practicing. List these as criteria. Then ask them what would make a “bad” effort and a “great” effort. Describe these. After, copy these down into a rubric (or have a student do this) and then put this up for all to see in the classroom. You might even do this in the students L1 if possible – the goal being to communicate expectations and not to “teach” language.

2. Teacher made. The teacher can make the rubric. Usually the teacher uses a premade rubric that they modify for their classroom. Rubistar is a popular site for finding these rubrics and making them online.

Here is a handy template that I’ve got a lot of mileage from. A nice way to make a rubric, alone or with students! For more on rubrics or more assessment ideas – see our assessment resources. Also this page too, has many links.

Assessment – Have we got it all wrong?

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I just spent an exhausting but stimulating weekend away from home attending a conference. Nice, engaging teachers and sessions. The last session was an open mic panel discussion and one of those on the panel Mike Misner, an extensive reading enthusiast, commented that “we should assess students by HOW MUCH they have read, not how well they can read”.

On the way home, Devon Thargard (from Super Simple Songs – a simply great site for those teaching young learners!) and I got discussing this as we zoomed along on the bullet train. My own thoughts were also zooming along.

I got to wondering that maybe we have it all wrong – we shouldn’t micro assess. Rather, because language ISN”T a body of knowledge and facts – we should base assessment solely on what the student does. Now I’m not talking benchmarks and functional checklists. I’m talking – a very general assessment of how active they are, doing whatever they are asked. Devon commented that we should “judge” based on how much the student was using/encountering/being active with language. Mostly because that is the only way to be honest. About the only thing we are sure about in regards to language acquisition and learning is — the more students are encountering language, the more they are learning. There are too many other factors involved to discern or go any further in our conclusions about “what a student is learning?” or “if a student has learned”.

I have always thought it would be great to assess speaking by having students wear a device that counts how many times their mouth moved and pronounced an English word. Add them up and you got English mileage and a speaking score.

You could go further and develop head gear which records students actively decoding and “thinking ” English. If it is glowing the purple English color – high marks! A teacher could quickly scan the class and SEE who is learning.

Or how about writing. Couldn’t we assess students by how much they write. They are learning more and after all – the goal of us language teachers is not to create a poet but to create a person who can write in a basic, communicative fashion.

How can we create the odometers of the English language? Is there any technology out there that might help us?

I know I’m writing mostly in jest but I think these are valid things to think about. Assessing students by how active they are with language and forgeting all the fine points…..

If you are curious about more traditional assessment issues and tools for EFL / ESL – see my Assessment in EFL Classroom’s resources.