Summary Unit 21 Choosing assessment activities

When planning assessment, we need to think about our reason for assessing learners. Then we can decide when and how often to assess them, and choose what methods of assessment we are going to use.

Formal assessment:

• Objective tests
• Oral interviews
• Letters
• Essays

We need to include a number of different tasks, so that we get a good picture of our learners' strengths and weaknesses.
We have to test the main things we have taught.
We need to choose assessment tasks very carefully for young learners, making sure that the tasks are familiar and not too difficult or abstract.

Informal assessment:

• It is important to keep records of informal assessment, so we have the information we need to report or give feedback on our learners´ progress
• We need to plan informal assessment in the same way we plan our teaching

In the case of productive skills, whether the assessment is formal or informal, we need to judge learners´ performance against clear descriptions of different levels of skill.