Introducing Second Language Assessment

In Chapter 12, the author discusses approaches to judging the effectiveness of both criterion-referenced and norm-reference performance assessments. The chapter includes guidelines for helping create or evaluate performance assessments for particular contexts. It also describes how to use statistical techniques for the same purpose. The chapter presents actual ratings from a classroom-based group oral discussion test and shows how teachers used statistics to determine both score dependability and reliability. The author discusses how to calculate coefficient agreement to help determine the dependability of the assessment and Cronbach’s Alpha to help determine its reliability. A major point of the chapter is that when certain conditions exist, test users can exploit an assessment to determine test takers’ mastery of language criteria (criterion-referenced purpose) and to compare their abilities (norm-referenced purpose). The author provides an appendix that shows readers how to use Excel software to calculate the statistics in the chapter.