UDC 372.881.111.

Alternative assessment as a beneficial tool of evaluating students’

progress
Natalya Penner
My primary goal of writing this paper is to describe my experience with alternative
assessment in my teaching context and then to speak about the type of alternative assessment I
have used and analyze how it meets the five principles of assessment. I shall also try to see
what I will do differently during future alternative assessment to make it more effective taking
into account the results on my analysis.
To begin with I would like to point out that there are numerous types of authentic
assessment used in the classroom today. The range of possibilities is sufficiently broad that
teachers can select from a number of options to meet specific purposes or adapt approaches to
meet instructional or students’ needs (O’Malley & Piece, 1996). So in this case we speak
about alternative assessment. Why alternative assessment? The reason is that in our country in
my teaching context I always felt dissatisfaction because I couldn’t find a proper way of
effective assessment. I felt that there was something wrong in how I did it. Now it is clear to
me that to make the assessment process effective we must think how to meet five principles
of it. Somehow I understood that my decisions on students’ progress must not be based only
on simple test scores. As a matter of fact, very often test scores are surrounded by an area of
uncertainty (Bailey, 1998) when the difference of one-two points does not give my student the
opportunity to pass to a higher level even though s/he really deserves it. I have lots of such
examples in my teaching practice. In this case alternative assessment is considered to be more
beneficial if we wish see our students making a real progress.
In my teaching career I have tried many of the kinds of alternative assessment: oral
interview, story retelling, doing projects/exhibitions, teacher observations and making
portfolio. It was of great importance for me to observe students working at different tasks,
interacting with each other (debates, discussions etc.), giving feedback, self and peer
assessments etc. Of course I noticed the progress of my students but I didn’t always make
records of these observations. What I really needed to do is to systematize my notes to make
my observations more reliable.
I started thinking about using students’ portfolio to my teaching not so long ago.
There is still no demand on the part of school administration to do it. Now I see that a
portfolio is a purposeful collection of student work that is intended to show progress over
time. The portfolio may include samples of student work, usually selected by the student or by
the student and teacher to represent learning based on instructional objectives needs
( O’Malley & Piece, 1996) .Ideally students have to collect the best evidence about their
performance (book reports, test results, essays etc.), some individual information (personal
data), their feedback on classroom teaching/learning, analysis of their progress, strengths and
weaknesses (reflection essays) and teacher’s observation and feedback .But student portfolios
take many forms and we must bare in mind that a portfolio is not the pile of students work
that accumulates over a semester or a year (Mueller, 2011).
Now I can clearly see that I have not always thoroughly planned all the procedures,
sometimes I simply collected all their works though I realize that this is a good way to
observe my students’ progress and growth, a wonderful opportunity to increase their
motivation and provide a positive washback. Therefore, my previous assessments suffered
imperfections which led to problems with reliability (lack of students’ scoring guidelines) and
validity (construct and content: how to separate language and content). Even now I’m not sure
about developing a systematic procedure for analyzing these materials as this is very time-
consuming from the point of view of practicality (I have 178 students this year) Still I am not
completely sure that there is strong involvement and commitment of all my students to such
type of assessment as portfolio and if all of them see its advantages (validity) as many of the
students say that making a portfolio is a waste of time. I need to work a lot to show the
effectiveness of portfolio as a kind of tool for showing students’ progress - first of all I need to
do it systematically and purposefully (O’Malley & Piece, 1996). Now, when I have studied a
lot of materials on this subject I hope to improve portfolio assessment as it is one of the best
ways to integrate the results of individual performance assessments and to monitor learning
over time (O’Malley & Piece, 1996). The effective teacher will consider interdisciplinary
performance assessments which help create opportunities for students to connect what they
are learning in the English as a Foreign Language classroom to the outside world (Evans,
2006) making portfolio practical and authentic.
Having analyzed my experience I have come to the conclusion that one of the main
challenges for me was the fact that such kind of alternative assessments as portfolio was used
in a relatively informal way that did not provide systematic information about student learning
(O’Malley & Piece, 1996). I can point the most important challenges I faced implementing
alternative assessment – no continuous planning and systematic work (I did it from time to
time), unclear objectives for me as well as for the students , unclear scoring system if any ,
time-consuming procedures, which resulted in problems with reliability and validity.
To sum everything up, I would like to underline that alternative assessment is very
beneficial for both students and teacher. When students are provided choice and ownership of
a project, task, activity through which they can express themselves, their interests and their
talents, many students who are not otherwise successful will choose to take the time and effort
to excel. (Evans, 2006).

REFERENCE
1. Bailey, K. (1998). Learning About Language Assessment. Dilemmas, Decisions and
Directions. Heinle & Heinle Publishers
2. Brown, H.D. & Abeywickrama, P. (2010). Language Assessment: Principles and Classroom
Practices, 2nd Ed. White Plains, NY: Pearson Education, Inc. White Plains, NY: Pearson
Education, Inc.
3. Evans Doug, 2006, The End Product.
4. O’Malley, J.M. & Piece, L.V. (1996). Authentic Assessment for English Language
Learners: Practical Approaches for teachers. Reading, MA. Addison-Wesley Publishing
Company.
5. Jon Mueller, Authentic Assessment Toolbox,
http://jfmueller.faculty.noctr.edu/toolbox/portfolios/htm