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Full-Text Articles in Education
What Information From Pisa Is Useful For Teachers? How Can Pisa Help Our Students To Become More Proficient?, Juliette Mendelovits, Dara Searle, Tom Lumley
What Information From Pisa Is Useful For Teachers? How Can Pisa Help Our Students To Become More Proficient?, Juliette Mendelovits, Dara Searle, Tom Lumley
Juliette Mendelovits
A frequent objection to large-scale testing programs, both national and international, is that they are used as an instrument of control, rather than as a means of providing information to effect change. Moreover, concerns about large-scale testing often take the form of objection to the specific characteristics of the assessments as being prescriptive and proscriptive, leading to a narrowing of the curriculum and the spectre of 'teaching to the test' to the exclusion of more important educational content. Taking PISA reading literacy as its focus, this paper proposes, on the contrary, that a coherent assessment system is valuable in so …
What Information From Pisa Is Useful For Teachers? How Can Pisa Help Our Students To Become More Proficient?, Juliette Mendelovits, Dara Searle, Tom Lumley
What Information From Pisa Is Useful For Teachers? How Can Pisa Help Our Students To Become More Proficient?, Juliette Mendelovits, Dara Searle, Tom Lumley
Dr Tom Lumley
A frequent objection to large-scale testing programs, both national and international, is that they are used as an instrument of control, rather than as a means of providing information to effect change. Moreover, concerns about large-scale testing often take the form of objection to the specific characteristics of the assessments as being prescriptive and proscriptive, leading to a narrowing of the curriculum and the spectre of 'teaching to the test' to the exclusion of more important educational content. Taking PISA reading literacy as its focus, this paper proposes, on the contrary, that a coherent assessment system is valuable in so …
Assessing Second Language Writing: The Rater’S Perspective, Tom Lumley
Assessing Second Language Writing: The Rater’S Perspective, Tom Lumley
Dr Tom Lumley
This study investigates the process of rating texts written by adult ESL learners. Four experienced raters provided think-aloud protocols describing the rating process for a set of 24 texts. The think-aloud data allowed analysis of the sequence of rating, raters' interpretations of the scoring categories, and difficulties raters faced. The study reveals the complexity of the rating process, whereby raters struggle to resolve a tension between the wordings (or rules) of the rating scale and their complex, initial, intuitive impression of the text. Rating requires training to provide reliable measurement. The study also demonstrates that caution is needed in interpreting …
Assessment Criteria In A Large-Scale Writing Test: What Do They Really Mean To The Raters?, Tom Lumley
Assessment Criteria In A Large-Scale Writing Test: What Do They Really Mean To The Raters?, Tom Lumley
Dr Tom Lumley
The process of rating written language performance is still not well understood, despite a body of work investigating this issue over the last decade or so (e.g., Cumming, 1990; Huot, 1990; Vaughan, 1991; Weigle, 1994a; Milanovic et al., 1996). The purpose of this study is to investigate the process by which raters of texts written by ESL learners make their scoring decisions using an analytic rating scale designed for multiple test forms. The context is the Special Test of English Proficiency (step), which is used by the Australian government to assist in immigration decisions. Four trained, experienced and reliable step …