Presenter: Antony John Kunnan
PLENARY:
How can teachers be responsible language assessors?
Antony John Kunnan
University of Macau
Language assessments are noticeable everywhere in the educational context - from kindergarten all the way to high school, junior college, and onto university levels. These assessments may be large-scale assessments that are centrally organized by a government agency for a province/state or the whole country that are administered once a year. Or, they could also be small-scale assessments that are developed, administered, scored and reported by a single teacher or a group of teachers in a primary or high school or college. Such assessments may be conducted regularly, every week or month or term and may even be informal and continuous. In both cases, teachers are involved in teaching or in assessing their students. But do they know whether their assessments are fair and whether the institutions they are working in are just.
Thus, how can teachers become responsible language assessors through in-service or teacher-training programs and in their classroom practice? The first step would be for teachers to become aware of the guiding principles (such as fairness of assessments and assessment practice and justice in institutions who administer or use test scores) based on ethical thinking. The second step would be for teachers to understand what claims assessments are making (such as adequate opportunity-to-learn, clear meaningfulness and absence of bias, beneficial consequences, etc.). The third step would be for teachers to understand how assessment claims are supported by research findings (in the areas of opportunity-to-learn, meaningfulness, absence of bias, fairness, access, accommodations, and consequences). This talk will provide ideas to how this can be accomplished in teacher training programs.