Testing in the classroom: an essential guide

test

You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.
George W. Bush

Testing is a complex and technical area which is littered (some might say infested) with terminology. There is a fuller guide to the area in the in-service section (most of which you don't need to know for the purposes of testing in the classroom).

Defining terms

Which of following do you see as a test? Click on the table when you have an answer.

testing task 1

Trick question?
No, not really. The point is that any of these activities can be seen as a form of testing. You are asking questions or setting tasks to find something out about the learners' abilities.
We can take them one at a time:

a public examination

This sort of test is instantly recognisable to most of us. It is usually a very formal procedure with strict rules for its conduct.
The obvious examples are tests such as IELTS, Cambridge First Certificate (and the other levels in that suite) and so on.

doing that exercise

In this case, the exercise is only marginally a test because the only person who will look at the result is you. However, in a classroom, you might set a task like this to find out what people already know. In this case is was not a test but an awareness-raising activity to get you thinking.

asking someone if she understands

this is a kind of test but it's a pretty poor one because the answer won't tell you a great deal. Learners from a range of cultural backgrounds will normally respond positively to a question like this because that's the least threatening thing to do. A test to avoid.

using a multiple-choice exercise

You may be using such an exercise as a teaching tool, to alert people to the range of choices, for example. However, most learners will see it as some kind of test and the outcomes will, presumably, be evaluated in some way. So it's a test.

saying, "Can you pronounce this word?"

This is a test if you want to hear the learner pronounce it rather than being satisfied with an answer like "Yes, thanks" or a nod.

using a role play exercise at the end of a lesson

The purpose of activities like this is twofold:

they give the learners an opportunity to use the language in a freer way and make it a bit more personal to them
but
they also allow you to discover if they can actually use it in the way you hoped.

So it's a test.

asking what a word means

This is clearly a test. You want to know if the person knows the word or not. Be aware, however, that giving an off-the-cuff definition of a word in a foreign language is very challenging (that's what keeps dictionary writers in business). It's perfectly possible to know all you need to know about a word and still not be able to give a neat, clear definition of it.

asking a learner to tell you about yesterday

This may just be a bit of social chit-chat but in a classroom, many learners will assume they are being tested and their production evaluated. Good teachers will be listening carefully to see how well the learner can do this.

Some terms to help us think

If almost everything we do can be seen as some sort of test, what are the differences? The following is not meant to bamboozle you with terminology but to sort the wood from the trees and help us focus. There are only four terms to grasp and they are pretty self-explanatory.

Can you make a stab at what any of these mean?

formal testing
informal testing
formative testing
summative testing

Click here when you have an answer.

formal testing

this is what public examinations are but also what end-of-week or end-of-course tests usually are. They have these characteristics:
1. formal tests are very often written
2. formal tests are not frequent
3. formal tests are usually quite objective (or appear so)
4. formal tests often have a set marking scheme (two marks for this, three for that etc.)
5. the results are communicated to the learners
6. learners recognise such tests for what they are and respond accordingly, i.e., they take them seriously
Example: at the end of every 20-hour teaching block, you construct a formal test of what you have covered. You mark the test as objectively as you can and communicate the scores to the learners. You can also rank the learners by how well they did.
informal testing

happens frequently in classrooms and informal tests have the following characteristics:
1. they can be anything from a simple question to a complicated role play
2. they require the teacher and the learner to evaluate rather than assess by recording marks
3. they do not rely on outcomes being given to the learners although feedback is often supplied somehow
Example: in the middle of a lesson in which you have introduced some new words in a topic area, you give the learners an exercise requiring them to match definitions or pictures to the words you have targeted. This alerts both you and the learners to what needs revising or revisiting and allows you to have the confidence to go on to using the language in a freer and more personal way (providing the learners have responded satisfactorily).
formative testing

can be formal or informal and is designed to aid the learning process by:
1. telling the teacher what has been learnt well so far and what needs more work
2. focusing learners on what needs to be mastered
3. being often quite frequent and done at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of lessons or a series of lessons
Example: You are about to embark on a lesson on using if-clauses such as
    If you get lost, call me and I'll come and get you
At the beginning of the lesson, you show a short video clip of someone on the telephone giving directions to her house. In it, she uses expressions such as:
    If you see the post-office on your left, you have gone too far
    If you can't see the turning, look for the sign to Margate and follow that
etc.
You provide a test of their comprehension by asking some simple True / False questions such as
    The visitor should look for a sign to Ramsgate
    The visitor should turn right at the post-office
etc.
to see how much they can understand already and evaluate their ability to understand the meaning of if-clauses. From what emerges, you amend the lesson plan accordingly.
summative testing

is what happens at the end of a process and is designed to discover, for you and the learners, how well the targets have been learned. Examples are:
1. a public examination
2. an end-of-course written test
3. a final speaking exercise in a lesson
4. homework tasks
Example: you are teaching a class preparing for a public examination and, at the end of the first semester, you give the whole class a full mock examination to do at home.
They bring in their work and you spend a few lessons going through model / correct answers to the tasks so everyone can see how well they did and, even more importantly, how well they are prepared for the real thing.

It is, of course, not always so clear cut. Tests can be:

formative and formal: end-of week tests
written homework to be handed in and marked etc.
summative and informal: tasks set at the end of lessons to see what progress has been made
end-of-course activities which combine many aspects of what has been learned / taught
summative and formal: end-of-course tests
public examinations
formative and informal: checking understanding (Can you tell me what John said?)
checking pronunciation (Where's the stress on this word?)
checking grammar (What's the past of 'go'?)

The last of these is very frequently done because informal, formative testing goes on all the time in classrooms:
whenever a teacher is asking a question and whenever a teacher is listening to the learners' production or reading what they have written, informal, formative testing is happening.

A graphical way of seeing this is like this. You can see that both formative and summative testing can be either formal or informal.
The bottom row contains examples only.

summary

Try this little test to see if you have a handle on all of this.

Informal testing

Good informal testing is something that comes with training and experience. It's not rocket science and one of the best ways to do it is to listen carefully to your learners and ask questions which target what you need to know.
For example, simply asking:
    Do you understand the word industrialised?
is going to elicit some information (often what the learners thinks you want to hear) but it will need some expansion along the lines of:
    Can a person or an animal be industrialised?
    Can a country or a city be industrialised?
    Is it a verb or an adjective?
    What's the noun?
    Is Greenland an industrialised country?
    What about Britain?
    What places in your country are industrialised?
    Why do you say that?
and so on.
There's more on this in the guide to checking learning and the guide to asking good questions, both linked below.

What follows concerns more formal, often written, testing.
Although it is unlikely that you will be asked to design a very formal examination for your learners, teachers are often required (or want) to design a test which will either be summative and tell you and the learners how well the course has helped them to learn or formative which will tell you and the learners what has to be recycled and developed.
It is in this area that some knowledge of the principles of constructing a good test is helpful.

Formal testing

Validity

This is a term you will often hear applied to testing. It means three things:

Does the test measure what we say it measures?
For example, if we set out to test someone's ability to participate in informal spoken transactions, do the test items we use actually test that ability or something else?
Does the test contain a relevant and representative sample of what it is testing?
For example, if we are testing someone's ability to write a formal email, are we getting them to deploy the sorts of language they actually need to do that?
Does the test look like a proper test?
You want your learners to take it seriously so presentation is important.

Simple. Of course, we want our test to be valid so here's a short guide to how to write a good test.

The test can be formative (in the middle of a course or even a lesson) or it can be summative (coming at the end of a course or series of lessons).

The process:

making a test

Deciding what to test: prioritising and organising

This is where good record-keeping comes in handy. Briefly, this means

looking back and selecting the areas you think need testing. You won't be able to test everything (unless you have taught very little) so
prioritise the list to make sure you are being fair to all your learners. They will better at some skills than at others so mix it up.
now break the list down into skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening), grammar and structures, pronunciation and lexis

Selecting test items and working out how to mark the test

Now you have your list, you can decide how to test the items.

Types of tests

true or false: This called an alternate-answer test. You can expand it slightly to include True, False and Don't know (the answer isn't in the text).
For example:
    In the list above there were three factors concerned with Validity:
        True: O
        False: O
multiple-choice: This is sometimes called a fixed-response test. Typically, the correct answer must be chosen from three or four alternatives. The 'wrong' items are called the distractors.
For example:
    Choose the best answer:
        Summative testing is designed mainly to:
            A: help the learning process
            B: plan the rest of a lesson
            C: focus the learners on what they need to learn
            D: find out how well something has been learnt
structured response: In tests of this sort, you give a structure in which to form the answer. Skeleton sentence items of the sort which require the subject to expand a sentence are tests of this sort.
For example:
    Use the words here to make a correct English sentence:
        He / come/ my house / yesterday / 9 o'clock
        ______________________________________________________
            (Answer: He came to my house at 9 o'clock yesterday Yes, we had to move the time phrases around.)
free response: In these tests, no guidance is given other than the instructions (called the rubric, incidentally) and the learners are free to write or say what they like. A hybrid form of this and a structured response item is one where the subject is given a list of things to include in the response.
For example (free response):
    Write 200 words about a good holiday experience.
For example (hybrid):
    Write 200 words about what method of transport you prefer
        Say:
        What it is and when you last used it
        Why you like it
        List three advantages
        List two disadvantages
        Finish with a recommendation
These sorts of tests can also be done orally.
For example (free response):
    Tell me about the last film your saw.
For example (hybrid):
    Ask your partner about his last holiday and find out:
        where he went
        who he went with
        what he enjoyed the most and the least

Have a look at this graphic and decide what goes in the columns on the right. Then click on it to compare your answers.

test types

Some more examples

	Data	Task	Comment
1	A text about someone's hobbies and interests. For example, I much enjoy walking and reading but have little time for sports and outdoor games which are just too energetic for me now that I'm getting on a bit. I don't watch much television these days because I find it all rather dull and depressing.	The writer states that she used to do a lot of sports. True or False?	The longer the text and the more complex the sentence structure, the harder it is. The more the reader has to read between the lines, the harder it is.
2	The same as above.	Choose the best answer: a) She has never watched television much b) She dislikes depressing television programmes c) She never went in for outdoor activities d) She has never played sports	The nearer the distractors are to the truth, the harder it is. The more different the words in the question are from the text, the harder it is (see c)).
3	She / sports / now / she / getting	Expand the sentences making the necessary changes	You usually need a bit of context to get reliable responses. With the text above, the response should be: She doesn't play much sports now because she is getting on a bit.
4	She _______ play _______ many ________ as she _______ to.	Fill the gaps with a single word.	This is sometimes called a Cloze test although it isn't technically. A better term is a gap-fill test.
5	Same text as above.	Now write a similar paragraph about your* hobbies and interests using the text as a guide. Write no more than 150 words.*	This is a hybrid between free and structured response.

Marking tests: reliability

Some of those test items require more judgement by the marker (usually you) than others.
The more subjective the marking is, the less reliable will be the results. For example:

Item 1 and 2 are either right or wrong so easy to mark but remember that you can get 50% by guessing in item 1, and 25% in item 2. You can also get it right even if you don't understand most of the text.
In item 4, would you accept She didn't play so many games as she wanted to when what you actually wanted was She doesn't play as many sports as she used to? To get round the problem, you can give the learner a selection of words to choose from but that makes it easier, of course. The same issue arises with item 3.
Item 5 demands most of the marker because you will have to assess against a range of criteria, such as:
- use of lexis
- accuracy of grammar
- content
- ordering
- use of connectors
etc.
That's quite difficult to do and maintain fairness at the same time.

There are, of course, many more variants and types of test item than we can cover here. Look at tests in coursebooks and be aware that most examination boards and ELT publishers have examples of tests and test types on their websites. Go there for more ideas.

Related guides
testing	the fuller and more technical guide to this area in the in-service training section
asking good questions	for a guide to how to check learning and use formative, informal testing in the classroom
checking learning	a related guide to informal formative and summative assessment

Of course, there's a test on all of this: some formal, summative evaluation for you.

Reference:
A very accessible and clear text is:
Hughes, A, 1989, Testing for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press