Fourth Assignment

Summary Principles of Language Assessment

PRACTICALITY
And effective test is practical. This means that it
• is not excessively expe.nsive,
• stays within appropriate time constraints,
• is relatively easy to administer, and
• has a scoring/evaluation procedure that is specific and time-efficient.
A test that is prohibitively expensive is impractical. A test of language proficiency that takes a student five hours to complete is impractical-it consumes more time (and money) than necessary to accomplish its objective.

REIlABILITY
A reliable test is consistent and dependable. If you give the same test to the same student or matched students on two different occasions, the test should yield similar results.
The issue of reliability of a test may best be addressed by considering a ·number of factors that may contribute to the unreliability of a test. Consider the following possibilities (adapted from Mousavi, 2002, p. 804): fluctuations in the student, in scoring, in test administration, and in the test itself.

VALIDITY
By-far the most complex criterion of an effective test-and arguably the most important principle-is validity, "the extent to which inferences made from assessment results are appropriate, meaningful and useful in terms of the purpose of the assessment" (Gronlund, 1998, p. 226).
A valid test of reading ability actually measures reading ability not 20/20 vision, nor. previous knowledge ina subject, nor some other variable of questionable relevance. To measure writing ability, one might ask students to write as many words as they can in 15 minutes, then simply count the words for the fmal score.
Such a test would be easy to administer (practical), and the scoring quite dependable (reliable). But it would not constitute a valid test of writing ability without some consideration of comprehensibility, rhetorical discourse elements, and the organization of ideas, among other factors.

AUfHENTICITY
A fourth major principle oflanguage testing is authenticity, a concept that is a little slippery to define, especially within the art and science of evaluating and designing tests. Bachman and Palmer, (1996, p. 23) define authenticity as "the degree of correspondence of the characteristics of a given language test task to the features of a target language task," and then suggest an agenda for identifying those target language tasks and for transforming them into valid test items.

WASHBACK
A facet of consequential validity, discussed above, is "the effect of testing on teaching and learning" (Hughes, 2003, p. 1), otherwise known among language-testing , specialists as washback.  In large-scale assessment, washback generally refers to the effects the tests have on instruction in terms of how students prepare for the test. "Cram" courses and "teaching to the test" are examples of such washback. Anot;l1er form ofwashback that occurs more in classroom assessment is the information thAt "wa,shes back" to students in the form of useful diagnoses of strengths and weaknesses.

Reference
Brown, H. Douglas. 2004. Language Assessment: Principle and Classroom Practice. New York: Pearson Education