Assessing Achievement with the ELL in Mind: Key points of Unit 3

The third unit of the Coursera Assessing Achievement with the ELL in Mind course focuses on alternative assessments and modified assessments, and gave some examples from mathematics, language arts and history. It also discussed issues concerning the grading of assessments.

Note 1: The left column below is a brief summary of the key points of the Coursera unit. The right column contains my suggested links to further information and advice on the same content.
Note 2: ELL = English language learner. The corresponding acronym used elsewhere on this site is ESL student = English as a second language student. [ More ]

Unit 3: Alternative Assessments with the ELL in Mind

Alternative Assessments

You may have students whose limited English language proficiency will prevent them from being able to show what they know or can do via the assessments you set for the rest of the class (both formative and summative). In such cases you can use alternative methods of assessing their knowledge and skills.

Alternative methods include observations, interviews, checklists, sentence frames and graphic organizers.

Portfolios are a popular form of alternative assessment - and not just for ESL students. They allow learners to demonstrate how their content knowledge, cognitive and language skills have developed over time.

Point to note:

ESL teachers are happy to suggest alternative ways in which, for any given task, the ESL students in your classes can demonstrate their content knowledge and skills.

More on Alternative Assessment

Using Alternative Assessments

A brief overview of the advantages and disadvantages of alternative assessment, as well as guidelines for constructing them.

Practical Ideas on Alternative Assessment for ESL Students

Another brief article, with some useful suggestions. (.pdf)

What we talk about when we talk about best practices: Assessment

A detailed analysis of traditional and alternative assessment methods, including a lengthy discussion of portfolio assessment.

Modified Assessments

A modified assessment is one that has been adapted in some way to make it manageable by ESL students. The modifications are based on an analysis of the linguistic demands of the assessment tasks, both input (what students have to read to understand the task) and output (the language they must produce to complete the tasks successfully).

Points to note:

The challenge for teachers in modifying assessment tasks is to maintain the cognitive and content demands while at the same time simplifying the English language demands.
As well as modifying the language of the tasks, teachers can make the assessments more manageable for ESL students through various accommodations. Typical accommodations include allowing more time to complete the test, reading questions aloud, providing sentence frames that allow students to insert key words into gaps, and permitting dictionary use.
ESL teachers can advise on the language demands of a given task, and suggest modifications and accommodations to make it a fairer and more accessible way for ESL students to demonstrate content knowledge and skills.
If modifications and accommodations have been applied, then it should be possible for ESL students to be graded in the same way as other students; for example, via a rubric which categorises the level of knowledge and skill demonstrated by the student.

More on modified assessments

Preparing ESL-friendly worksheets and tests

From this website: Information about what makes written tasks difficult to understand, and how they can be modified for maximum comprehensibility.

The page also contains suggestions about other accommodations that can result in the assessment task being a fair one for ESL students to demonstrate their knowledge and skills.