ES instrumento de evaluación / CAT instrument d’avaluació / FR instrument d’évaluation / DE Bewertungsinstrument

An assessment tool is a mediating tool that facilitates the gathering of the information necessary to teach and learn. In the development of plurilingual discourse competence, assessment tools contribute to the recording and sharing of the criteria and indicators of achievement of the different discourse genres being taught and learned in the classroom. As they depend on the context, these instruments are necessarily ephemeral, as a result of the modeling performed in class. This may be reflected in very different tools, such as checklists, rubrics with descriptors of competency levels, conceptual schemes or visual representations, blogs, etc. The common aim of all assessment tools is to specify and share the aspects that the assessment will take into account. Therefore, these tools facilitate communication and guidance throughout the learning process.

The requirements ensuring that an assessment tool will be useful are validity and reliability, on the one hand, and its application and adaptation to the specific situation and learning goal, on the other. In other words, the tool will only be valid if it actually measures what it is intended to measure (for instance, discourse competence in the handling of a discourse genre), and will only be reliable if the judgment delivered by the different participants coincides with each others’, that is, if it is consistent (Bisquerra 1989). In addition, regarding learning, it is important that the assessment tool should be contextualized, given that it is the result of a consensus between students and teachers regarding the most appropriate judgment for that specific teaching-learning process. If assessment is conceived as communication, the joint creation and a shared understanding of assessment tools at the outset of a task are fundamental learning activities and a prerequisite for achievement assessment.

References

  • Atienza, Encarna (1998). Propuesta de evaluación del texto escrito en Enseñanza Secundaria. Barcelona: Universidad de Barcelona, tesis doctoral en línea: http://diposit.ub.edu/dspace/handle/2445/41390
  • Bisquerra, Rafael (1989). Métodos de investigación educativa. Guía práctica. Barcelona:CEAC.
  • Consejo de Europa (2018). Common European framework of reference for languages: learning, teaching, assessment. Companion volume with new descriptors. Estrasburgo: Council of Europe Publishing. Disponible en https://rm.coe.int/common-european-framework-of-reference-forlanguages-earning-teaching/168074a4e2