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Matching assessment
to your goals
When thinking about matching our assessments to the goals of instruction,
we must keep the end in mind. The endpoint is the performance assessment
– the application of learning to a real-life or authentic
communication situation. With this endpoint clearly in mind, we
then need to ask ourselves what other assessments will be useful
along the way to monitor our students’ progress. These assessments
should be viewed as opportunities to provide meaningful feedback
to the students concerning their learning. The better the feedback
to the student, the better their final performance will be. 
The
assessment tools we use to check on student progress during a unit
of instruction will vary with the goal or objective of what in the
lesson we want to assess. We might use a quiz, a journal entry,
a pairwork activity, an essay, a test, a class discussion, or an
oral question/answer activity to see how well the students have
learned the concepts. Remember, these assessments are all part of
the process or practice needed in order to complete the final performance.
These assessments will tell if the students understand a concept
or how to use a particular structure correctly. They indicate how
many vocabulary words the students know. They can provide evidence
that the Standards for Culture, Comparisons, Connections, and Communities
are being addressed in the class. But if we stop assessing here,
we haven’t reached our endpoint: the final performance assessment.
The final performance assessment is the application of what the
students learned in the unit to a real-life or authentic communication
situation. We understand from the Standards that there are three
aspects to communication: an Interpretive mode, an Interpersonal
mode, and a Presentational mode. Our final performance assessment
must reflect those three modes. And when we look back at our unit
plans, the instructional strategies and assessments should provide
practice in all three modes. Matching our assessments to our goals
means thinking of that final communication situation as we plan
our unit.
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