Book Review

Assessment Package Offers Useful Resource for Novice and Experienced Practitioner Alike

Jeanne Kearsely
City College of San Francisco
San Francisco, CA

Collaborations Assessment Package
Level: Beginning 1, Beginning 2
Cathy C. Shank
Boston: Heinle and Heinle, 1996.

Teachers working in non-credit or workplace education programs
face the ongoing challenge of accounting for or demonstrating student progress. Quantifying student progress on a form acceptable to funders and or program administrators can be challenging. Standardized or commercially available tests, which produce funder friendly numbers, are inappropriate to most learner-centered, non academic, adult education programs. Consequently, instructors create their own assessment tools to more accurately test students on the content and instructional methods utilized by their programs. The difficulty of translating the test results into a more usable form for the number of audiences remains, however. The assessment package from the Collaborations series presents a possible solution to this task.

Collaborations is a five-year series designed for the non-credit, adult education program. The series is based on the tenets of a learner-centered and holistic approach to ESOL instruction. In addition to the students books’, workbooks, teachers’ manuals and supplemental materials, each level also includes an assessment package. The package is intended to be used in conjunction with the Collaborations series. Its design is generic enough, however, to be used independently of the series.

The materials in the assessment package do not break any new ground in the area of authentic, learner-centered assessment. The majority of its instruments and assessment procedures are fairly traditional, like the initial intake interview and the cloze passages, and have been used in adult education programs for many years. The author does highlight the use of portfolio assessment as a separate alternative section.

The material is clearly presented and the tools can be adapted by an entire program or as needed by classroom instructors. Flexibility in a commercially-prepared assessment instrument is extremely important and rare. The package covers all aspects of the student assessment process: initial, ongoing, and mid- and end-of-level assessment.

Examples of self assessment techniques and course evaluation forms are also included in the package. The content of the forms can be readily changed to reflect the material covered by a specific class or program. I particularly liked the author’s concrete suggestions for incorporating various assessment practices into everyday classroom routine, for example pair work, interviewing and reporting, and information gap exercises. These are all valid forms of ongoing assessment.

While students are engaged in these activities the teacher is free to circulate and evaluate students. The author also makes a point of identifying activities that teachers may already use in the classroom and suggest ways of incorporating them into the assessment process. I think it was brilliant and I wish she had developed the point further.

Another strength of the assessment package is that it is extremely comprehensive. Charts throughout the package clearly illustrate the content, uses and skills tested by the various instruments. The forms, scripts and scoring keys are clear and comprehensible. These forms are duplication ready and accompanied by very explicit instructions. Clear and basic instructions are essential for practitioners with limited experience implementing non-academic assessment tools. Some of the author’s advice may seem too basic — “remember to smile” and “make students feel welcome and comfortable.” Sometimes, though, these small details that we assume everyone knows need to be explicitly stated for the benefit of newcomers and experienced practitioners alike.

In many ways the assessment package is similar to a survey course of “learner-friendly” assessment practices, theories and techniques. I particularly like that the author included a brief synopsis of the theory behind many of the practices she utilized. A clear correlation between theory and application is particularly helpful to those new in the field. Unfortunately, as happens with most survey courses, the treatment of the subject matter can at times seem somewhat superficial and overly simplistic.

I found this to be particularly true when the author gives advice for orienting low-level students to less traditional initial intake and ongoing assessment procedures. For example, suggestions such as “use facial expressions, body language and demonstrations” are not particularly helpful when a teacher is trying to convey the potentially confusing concepts involved in portfolio assessment. Teachers working with very low-level students who want to use alternative methods of assessment need more practical and concrete advice.

Overall, the Collaborations Assessment Package is a very useful resource for classroom teachers and program coordinators. I think the assessment package would be particularly helpful to individuals who have limited experience creating or implementing assessment tools in non- academic or workplace learning situation. It is a well presented collection of assessment tools easily accessible and implemented by either experienced or novice practitioners.

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Originally published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 9 (December 1996),
SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 1996.

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.