UNIT 2 INFORMAL ASSESSMENT

Informal assessment is a complementary kind of assessment, which teacher carefully assess focusing in linguistic (skill tasks and activities) and non-linguistic factors (attitude, participation in class, punctuality, organization, etc). He assess the students’ performance in speaking, writing, reading and listening according with his intuitive judgment (observation) and clear criteria (rating scales or bands), either in groups or individually in a continuous period of time. It is important, teacher’s assessment organization, and the use of techniques, to produce a reliable and objective informal assessment system. Teacher must inform students, which will be the criteria (in terms of what he expects their students be able to do, in the particular aspects of each skill), before starting the course. Finally teacher should make a balance between informal assessments and also include the formal assessments and self-assessment to get the final evaluation of his students.

THE ASSESSMENT PLAN

1. - What would you assess?
Formal 55% and informal assessment 55%

2. - What linguistic and non linguistic factors would you assess?

• 
  LINGUISTIC FACTORS
  
  Speaking activities
  · Pronunciation of
  · Fluency
  · Relevance
  · Intonation
  · Accuracy
  
  Listening activities
  Accuracy
  Listening for specific information in short conversation and discuss it.
  Listening a text and fill the correct information in the chart
  
  Reading activities
  Fluency
  Use of skills: main idea, and scanning.
  Group reading
  Pair reading
  
  Writing activities
  Fill in the blanks
  Homework
  True/false utterances
  Writing for one personal anecdote
• NON-LINGUISTIC FACTORS
  
• Effort
  Participation
  Pair/Group work
  Organization
  Attendance
  Self-correction
  creativity
  
  
  3. - What would be assessed informally?
  Informal assessment: 55%
  
  Reading:
  
• Read the text and answer the questions about your person. Where was she/he born? When was she/he born? What do you learn about her/his childhood? Which people played a part in her/his career? What do you think were the most important events in her/his life? What do you learn of her/his works?
  
• Try to guess the words underlined from the context.
  
• Then use your dictionary to check the words.
  15%
  
• Writing:
  
• The students think of their favorite room, and then draw a plan of it on a piece of paper.
  
• Write down why you like it
  
• Write down some adjectives and adverbs to describe it.
  Show a partner your writing and correct mistakes together.
  15%
  
• Speaking:
  
• The student give his/her opinion about if food is as much as a part of a country’s culture as its landscape, language and literature.
• Then the student discuss the following questions: Which are your favorite places to eat in your country? And why?
  15%
  
  EVALUATION
  
• Criteria:
  5- Able to read - no errors
  Very good writing and fluently speaking
  4 -Able to read but he/she has some errors, in writing have some errors which no affect the understanding, speaks quiet fluently
  3 -Some difficulties in reading, many errors in writing, speaking he/she doesn’t has fluently that all
  2- Difficulty in reading, he/she doesn’t have enough knowledge to make sentences, he/she get stuck at the moment of speaking
  1- Not able to read, speak or write.
  students
  Reading 15%
  Writing 15%
  Speaking 15%
  Final grades
  45%
  comments
  Carlos Rodriguez
  2
  2
  1
  15%
  He needs to work in his speaking
  and writing skills.
  Eva Rios
  4
  5
  5
  44%
  One of the best students
  Jonathan Murrieta
  4
  4
  5
  41%
  He has a few mistakes/ just need practice.
  Doris Choy
  4
  5
  3
  40%
  He has a few mistakes/ just need practice.
  Silvia Dubois
  5
  5
  5
  45%
  Always do his best.
  
  4.-What would be assessed formally?
  Formal assessment: 55%
  
• Grammar: This skill will be tested underlying the correct verb form in the sentences; example while he rode/was riding in the forest he lost/was losing his wig.
  10%
  
• Reading comprehension: This skill will be tested by answering comprehension questions about a text; example does the magazine article talk more about the positive side of winning a lot of money, or the negative side? How can a large amount of money affect …our work? ….our home? …our friends?
  15%
  
• Vocabulary: In written form it can be tested with a matching exercise, example in a list will be a list of verbs and in the second list nouns and phrases related with some verb, so if the students know the vocabulary could associate the verb with the phrase.
  15%
  
• Writing comprehension: The skill will be tested with filling gaps exercises in a written form test.
  15%
  What would be the weight?
  Informal Assessment 55%
  Participation 10%
  Reading 15%
  Writing 15%
  Speaking 15%
  Formal assessment 45%
  Grammar 15%
  Reading comprehension 10%
  Vocabulary 10%
  Writing comprehension 10%
  
  REFLECTION
  
  In this unit we learned deeper what informal assessment is, we understood the relevance of use it, because we can see which students are performing well and which students are finding difficulties. It is very important teacher’s organization, for that reason firstly we learn how to develop an assessment plan for the unit or group of units chosen.
  We learned to design our own assessment plan taking decisions about what linguistic and non-linguistic factors we want to assess (assign them percentages) based on our learning objectives and contents we already did in the unit 1. We also learned to use some useful techniques as bands to assess our students. We read about some books activities that we could use to make the assessment of the linguistic factors, however we did not learn how to design our own activities, we just copied of some books, the reason was because we did not have experience and we need to read more books activities and practice them to become more creative and innovators.
  We learned to assign percentages to both formal and informal assessment according with our bands and the development of the students in the written and oral form; in this activity we assigned 55% to informal assessment and 45% to formal assessment.
  Finally, we really realized of the relevance of the informal assessment, as a future teachers we have to use a systematic observation based in an excellent organization, consequently the assessment plan is wonderful, and also the use of useful techniques as bands to assign our percentages. We think the purpose of this unit is to acquire the basis of an assessment organization system, emphasizing in what and how we are going to assess and which criteria we are going to use. We felt very happy to learn a lot of new things, because maybe we notice superficially this kind of bands and criteria, but now we know it deeper and we know how to link the informal assessment we do with our formal assessment.