chapter 1, testing and teaching.
This chapter is about how test and testers are mistrust from language teachers. It exposes several reasons for that; one of them is a bad backwash that sometimes it brings. Backwash is the effect that a test has on teaching and learners that is many times negative. Sometimes test do not measure what they were supposed to measure or their effects are negative.
The chapter talks also about how institutions in their hurry to test the proficiency levels sometimes do to many test with no real purpose and not having in mind the accuracy in their measuring. Test have also lack of reliability, a test is reliable if it measures consistently. In a reliable test you can be confident will get more or less the same score no matter the day or the time. An unreliable test will show many differences depending on external factors.
Another cause of this mistrust is the unreliable scores which many times don’t measure correctly the students learning or have mistaken in their grading machines that will give error in the results.
The chapter also touches on formative and summative assessment giving an explanation to be able to distinguish between the two.
Formative assessment is when teachers use it to check on students’ progress, to see how far they have mastered what they should have learned and then use this information to modify their future teaching plans.
Summative assessment is used at the end of a term, semester or year in order to measure was has been achieve.
At the end of the chapter it emphasized in what needs to be done to gain teachers trust on test. It concludes that test should be more reliable and accurate; they should also have questions that are not merely multiple choices, especially when measuring writing skills. The test point out the importance of test when done the right way and also the negative impact when they fall in the unreliability and inaccuracy that is making more teachers, students and institutions not believe on them.
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