Children's Assessment

Throughout the whole semester we have been writing about children’s abilities and skills during the classes. However, we have not talked about how we can make an assessment in which we can evaluate these children in order to demonstrate how much they have learned or acquired in this short time. Thus, this last entry will be focused on some ways of how we could assess them through an evaluative task, so here are my ideas.

 

One way of how we could assess students in order to evaluate their learning is through selected-response activities, such as matching. For example, they can match pictures with the correct words. Also, we could do it through using multiple choice activities. For example, we could put them a picture and some words in order that they can choose the word that belongs to that picture, or we could do it the other way around, it means by writing one word and putting some pictures so they can select the right picture.

In addition, we even could use true-false activities by asking them easy questions regarding to the vocabulary they have studied in order that they can say with their thumbs up or down if that is true or false. It can be done by using pictures or some other materials appealing for students. Selected-response activities are an effective way for evaluating students because as most of them are at the second stage of language development which is early speech, in which performance indicators are kinesthetic responses and one- or two-word utterances. During this stage, teachers ask students to name, number, list, and group words or phrases (Krashen and Terrell, 1983; adapted by Olsen, 1992), so that is what our children are able to do.

Moreover, we could evaluate them by assessing constructed response activities, such as: fill-in. We could do it through giving them some uncompleted words in which they can write some missing letters to those words.

 

To sum up, it is vital that we as teachers know as many assessment tools as we can in order to improve not only our teaching way but also to provide an effective learning to our students. 

References:

Shaaban, K. (2001). Assessment of young learners. In English Teaching Forum (Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 16-23).