Assessment is probably the last thing you’d like to think about as the beginning of the school year approaches. After all, you just put away every test and essay paper, right? But in this post, I’m going to give you 5 reasons why thinking about assessment at the start of the year can actually make a huge difference to your course and the quality of your teaching.

1. Goal setting
Teachers and students can only achieve their best results if they know what they want. Without a clear goal in mind, it’s very easy to lose focus and end up feeling that every lesson is somehow the same and you’re getting nowhere. If you set clear goals with your students at the beginning of the course, you can also outline the checkpoints where they can get feedback on their progress. It’s not just you who can easily lose motivation if things don’t seem to have a focus but your students, too. Giving them a number of checkpoints where you give constructive feedback on their performance is going to create a purpose for the whole course.

2. Choosing the best method
This point follows from the previous one. If you haven’t set clear goals, you can’t really have a consistent system of assessment. This can easily lead to tests that don’t measure what they should (i.e., they have a validity problem) or impromptu, hastily put-together end-of-course evaluations. I’ve also been here, don’t worry: I didn’t really know what my students want to get out of the course, so I just went with the assigned course book, added bits and pieces of my own, and by the end of the course I realised that we hadn’t really done any practice tests that led up to the final test, and even the content of the final test wasn’t entirely clear to anyone. Make sure you discuss what your students want and how this progress is going to be checked, to avoid this mistake.

Are you going to do lots of formative assessments (when the stakes are not so high and the focus is on continuous development) or just one or two summative ones (high-stakes tests that put students on a scale)? Are you going to integrate peer and self-evaluation (which students actually need to be trained up for) or just teacher-led feedback? Or do you maybe want to use gamification in your course, which needs a lot of forward planning on your end?

3. Designing tasks and requirements
There’s again a direct link between this point and the previous one. Once you know how you’re going to assess your students and give feedback, you will be able to design much better assignments for them. Often a teacher has a rough idea about what kind of task needs to be handed in, but the requirements and the evaluation criteria are not clear or developed at all. This can lead to confusion before doing the task, and to disappointment and puzzlement after receiving the feedback.

Letting your students know what they need to achieve (for example, in the form of a rubric) and how they are going to be evaluated (self, peer or teacher-led) can help focus their efforts and boost their performance immensely.

4. Being open to suggestions
Another advantage of having your entire system of assessment for the year ready at the beginning is that you can ask for your students’ opinions on it. I truly believe in the idea of working together with your students by treating them as equal partners, meaning that asking for their feedback is a valuable thing to do for both sides.

Based on their goals, you might have put together an amazing assessment plan, but it can happen that they think there should be more or less of something. Or they might shy away from the idea of peer feedback, so you can try and show them the benefits and hopefully get their buy-in beforehand instead of forcing them into an uncomfortable situation. You can also have a discussion about the entire point of certain assignments, which can be super important in the age of AI, which is my next and final point!

5. Plus one – AI
You can’t really have a blog post in 2023 without mentioning artificial intelligence in one way or another. I’m bringing it up here because you might have been accustomed to one way of doing things in your course, and these might not work so well anymore. For example, you have always given shorter writing tasks as homework because you’re doing exam preparatory lessons. But since ChatGPT, Google Bard and other AI-supported writing assistants became so well-known and so powerful, students have been tempted to hand in AI-written works.

Thinking about how you’re going to modify your assessment system knowing that AI can now easily do a lot of things for your students can put you ahead of the competition. Or you can also choose to sit down with them and try to have them understand that you’re interested in their capabilities and the point of the task is to see their own improvement instead of a machine’s work. 

Conclusion
To sum up these points, it’s a good idea to see them as a list of steps: 

• First, you discuss and set goals together with your students.
• Then you define where the checkpoints will be and which method of assessment will characterize these points.
• Now you can design the assessment tasks in detail, meaning that you also plan an assessment rubric (it can be a rough version at first) for them to help your students’ preparation.
• Finally, encourage your students to share what they like or not like about your system, be open to negotiations and compromise if necessary.

If you want to know more about how to use assessments effectively in your classroom, try these blogs:

• “How to use assessment for better learning and teaching” – Pablo Toledo
  www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2023/02/08/how-to-use-assessment-for-better-learning-and-teaching
• “Using integrated learning and assessment to motivate your students” – Sarah Unsworth
  www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2021/03/08/using-integrated-learning-and-assessment-to-motivate-your-students
• “Assessment for learning: 4 tips for teachers” – Chris Thorn
  www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2020/08/21/assessment-for-learning-afl-4-tips-for-teachers.