Thoughts on Assessment

Lesly Desire
The Log School
Dorchester, MA

Henry Joseph
Haitian Multi-Service Center
Dorchester, MA

The Log School English as a Second Language Program and the Haitian Multi Service Center in Boston have been working closely as a partnership to provide support services for families in Greater Boston. One of our objectives is to help immigrants make a smooth transition from their homelands to the United States. Another is to help them achieve their goals and to recognize this achievement by supporting them and teaching them the multiple skills needed to function in this country.

After attending last year’s SABES-sponsored workshops on alternative assessment, we decided to explore the issues further and participated in The Partnership Project. We saw this project as a way to look at existing assessment tools being used in programs similar to ours in the state.

We worked together to analyze and adapt the tools in the Toolkit and would like to share some thoughts and experiences with other members who participated in the project. We spent six months in this project, not developing tools but instead understanding the tools and experimenting with one to see if it would meet the needs of our program and the students.
Initial intake and ongoing assessment procedures can sometimes be difficult for us as practitioners to understand. That was the case for us, too, although we have been assessing adult learners for a while. We had to first think about how our students learn and how they progress before we could evaluate and experiment with the tools in the kit.

We struggled from the start with the idea of alternative assessment and felt at first that we could not keep up with the dialogue. It took us a while and a lot of effort to come up with some practical explanation of how our learners learned and progressed and what tools would complement these styles. It was also difficult to measure students’ learning capacity, especially adult immigrants whose goals and dreams have to do with financial independence. We saw one of our roles to be to make sure they have achieved academically.

We decided to try the monthly learning form to monitor our students’ progress on an ongoing basis. We observed that they were a little intimidated by the length of the forms. They even said that the forms we showed them were too much to fill out every month. We had hoped that they would see the usefulness of monitoring progress monthly. The students who were not capable of really writing or reading were reluctant to spend so much time on the forms. The ones that could already read and write were more apt to agree to participate.

We chose some things from the Toolkit after much discussion. The long charts and logs easily scare students off regardless of their educational background. We found, however, that the process of doing alternative assessment – in this case, monthly learning forms – took time to be done and time to be accepted. We could not assess these learners in one day and needed a process that would look at their progress on an ongoing basis.

People, including instructors, needed to be patient with each other during the experimenting time. These forms also became part of the teachers’ lesson plans, and alert teachers when things are not going well.

The Toolkit presented by The Partnership Project became an inspiration for all mentors and mentees. The GOALS project staff members have been wonderful in offering us resources and help. In sum, this project played an important role in the area of evaluation and our understanding of alternative assessment and forced us to ask a lot of questions about our students’ learning and progress. The monthly tool with which we chose to experiment had a tremendous effect of the students who were learning to become more confident and independent and also in letting the teachers have a tool to monitor progress monthly.

This article was published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 7 (December 1994), SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 1994.

Funding support for the publication of this document on the Web provided in part by the Ohio State Literacy Resource Center as part of the LINCS Assessment Special Collection.