PERFORMANCE AND PORTFOLIO ASSESSMENT FOR LANGUAGE MINORITY STUDENTS

SELF-ASSESSMENT: LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY

Purpose/Types

Self-assessment is an essential component of alternative assessment. Self-assessment enables students to reflect on their learning activities, task accomplishments, and progress in language development and other areas of instruction. Students see tangible evidence of learning when self-assessments are conducted periodically throughout the school year and can make plans to address areas where they feel they need more work. Students can also discuss their plans with their teacher and develop a schedule of learning and instructional activities through mutual agreement. Self-assessment measures of language proficiency can take the form of questionnaires, rating scales, and checklists.

Design

The limited research on self-assessment of language proficiency indicates that the more closely self-assessment measures relate to a student's reasons for using the language, the more reliable the information becomes (Oscarson, 1989). It has also been found that the type of questions used in self- assessments influence the size of the correlations between self-rating scores and scores obtained on language proficiency tests (Bachman & Palmer, 1989; LeBlanc & Painchaud, 1985).

Items that are related to the student's purposes for learning a language should provide more reliable information than those which are not. However, because the research on self-assessment of language proficiency has been conducted primarily with university students, the findings may have limited application at the upper elementary and middle grade levels. Teachers should, therefore, review the results of self-assessment relative to information generated from other sources.

One example of a rating scale for a self-assessment of reading ability is provided in Figure 4. Students are given a list of reading tasks and asked to indicate to what degree they think they can perform each task. Selected reading tasks should be appropriate to the students' grade level and reflect the local curriculum.

FIGURE 4. Self-Assessment of Reading Ability

In reading a passage, I can:

Administration

One of the advantages of using self-assessment measures is that they can be administered individually, to groups of students, or to all students in the class simultaneously. They can be conducted at the student's leisure, perhaps on a bi-weekly basis, or whenever the teacher wants to get feedback from students on their learning progress.

Scoring

Scoring scales for self-assessment measures depend upon the types of questions used. A three-point scale is illustrated in Figure 4, although some scales consist of as many as five or ten points. Intervals on a five-point scale might be described as follows: (5 points) I can do this all the time; (4) I can do this most of the time; (3) I can do this about half the time; (2) I can seldom do this; and (1) I can never do this (LeBlanc & Painchaud, 1985).

SELF-ASSESSMENT: LEARNING STRATEGIES

Purpose

Many teachers either implicitly or explicitly ask students to use various learning strategies in performing classroom assignments. There are a number of planning, attentional, self-evaluative, and study skills that teachers may include in their curriculum and guide students in using (Ellis & Sinclair, 1989; O'Malley & Chamot, 1990; Oxford, 1990; Rubin & Thompson, 1982; Wenden & Rubin, 1987). If teachers want to know whether or not students are using these strategies, they can ask them to reflect on their use by performing a self-evaluation. Students can describe their strategies in dialogue journals or learning logs at the end of each unit. A learning log is an ongoing record kept by students to evaluate their own strategies for learning, although it can also be used to record language development and content knowledge. Learning logs enable students to identify goals they want to accomplish through learning activities.

Design

Students may be asked to indicate whether or not they used any special techniques to help themselves learn. The following strategies appear in Chamot, O'Malley, & Kupper (1991):

• I paid attention to the teacher.
• I took notes when I listened.
• I looked at the questions before I read.
• I took notes when I read.
• I looked at my notes after class.
• I repeated new words aloud.
• I used new words in sentences.

Administration and Scoring

Teachers can provide students with a weekly checklist to use for self-assessment and ask students to keep this information in a notebook. The checklist can also be placed in a student portfolio, and the teacher can add anecdotal notes regarding student progress in the systematic use of learning strategies.