Chapter 7 - Monitoring and Assessment

Regarding the outer circles of the curriculum design, which means environment, needs and principles, provide data to guide planning of the processes in the inner circles. It takes into account the environment in which the course will be used, the needs of the learners and principles of teaching and learning process. It must have both informational and affective goals.

Types of Monitoring and Assessment

Within the purpose of monitoring we can find the assurance that learners will get the most benefit from the cousre, and suggesting changes to improve the curriculum of the course.

Placement Assessment: The learners are assessed at the beginning of a course to see what level of the course they should be in. The aim of this kind of assessment is to ensure that the content is not going to be too easy or too difficult.

Observation on Learning: It is done while the course is running, that activitites are carefully monitored to see if each particular activity is likelyto achieve its learning goal.

Short-term achievement assessment: It is applied at reguar intervals during the course, the learners may be monitored to see what they are learning from the course.

Diagnostic assessment: In order to plan a programme, it is useful to know where learners' strengths and weaknesses lie and where there are gaps in their knowledge and locate the areas of improvement.

Achievement assessment: Usually it is applied at the end of a course, and perhaps at one or two other points during the course, the learners are assessed on what they have learned so far.

Proficiency assessment: It is based on items drawn from the language as a whole rather than from the content of a particular course.

Good Assessment

Reliability: A reliable test gives results that are not greatly upset by conditions, that the test is not intended to measure. It is always given under the same conditions, it is consistently marked, it has a large number of points of assessment and questions and instructions are clear and unambiguos.

Validity: A valid test measures what it is supposed to measure, measuring what has been learned on the course. In order to check the validity of a test are to look at its face validity and content, which means that a test must call for its name or purpose. One of the major obstacles in examining content validity is to find some well-supported description of what language skills like reading and writing involve or what knowledge of the language items like vocabulary and grammar involves.

Practicality:Practicality is determined by examining whether the cost involved in administering and scoring the test, the time taken to administer and sit the test, the time taken to mark the test, the number of people needed to administer and mark the test and the ease in interpreting and applying the results of the test.