Reflection: Computer-Based Language Testing

This week has been a nice refresher on language assessment.  Well, I mean, I work in assessment at the PIE, so it's always on my mind, but I don't always get to look at the bigger picture.  This week, I especially liked being able to take a step back and consider the kind of assessments that I don't currently work on.  I especially like the formative assessment described in the Teo (2012) article and I also thought the electronic portfolios in the Cummins and Davense (2009) article have a lot of potential.

The Teo article impressed me a lot with the design of her formative inference test used as a treatment over the course of 10 weeks.  Teo included a link to a sample from her test, which can be found here.  Creating this assessment, to me, feels worthwhile because Teo was able to reach a very large number of students with it and as a low-stakes, formative assessment it could easily be used in future iterations of the course.  The test sample was very usable and worked well, too.

The electronic language portfolios described by Cummins and Davense are really interesting.  You can check out an EP site used in Europe here.  At this point, I feel that work needs to be done on making them more presentable and easily sharable, but the basic components of the portfolios are strong.  I also think that they could be used to assist with decision making often left solely to large scale proficiency tests.  For example, many universities admit students with a TOEFL score of 70 or higher.  However, for a student with a 70 or 71, their true score could lie between, say, 66 and 75 due to the standard error of measurement.  For those borderline cases, electronic language portfolios could possibly help with making better admission decisions.  If a student is able to show a video of authentic English interaction at an acceptable level (something not represented on the TOEFL, by the way), perhaps that could allow an admissions officer to more confidently admit a student with a 71 whose speaking score was a bit on the low end.  Similarly, English medium teaching demonstrations could help with the decision making process for awarding TAships to international graduate students (again, TOEFL scores alone do not indicate someone's proficiency with classroom English).