Introduction
There is some inconsistency in the definitions of curriculum-based assessment from standard to rather detailed. Wegerif and Mercer’s 1997,p.530) Curriculum based assessment incorporates any approach that uses direct inspection and recording of a student’s performance in the school curriculum as a foundation for obtaining information to make instructional assessment.
Coelho (1998, p.1) definition is more specific: “A curriculum based assessment (CBA) is a standard referenced test that is teacher-constructed and planned to reflect curriculum content.” Integrating both definitions provides a CBA with an assessment or standard-referenced perspective or a CBA comparable in style and use to informal assessment.
Curriculum based assessments (CBAs) may take account of characteristics of CRTs and informal tests. Like informal tests, CBAs are based on the content of the district or state implemented curriculum.
The significant use for CBAs is to find out the student’s functioning level(s) in the general education curriculum. For example, the results of a CBA presents teachers with information on the student’s instructional placement level in the basic reading system, the types of comprehension questions which give the student complexity, The student’s account of basic vocabulary words, and which word analysis skills the student knows or does not know. In other words, a CBA should present the teacher with precise information about the student’s functioning levels and specific skill knowledge, and which skills to teach next, thus, curriculum- based assessments are important in planning specific Individual Educational Programs (IEPs).
Curriculum-based assessments are valuable aids to teachers of English language students with mild disabilities in shaping skill deficiencies to amend in order to help students function successfully in the general classroom (Jones, p.8).
Issues surrounding curriculum and assessment of English language learners
Consequently, Language is an important factor in the assessment of student learning. This creates special problems for teachers in classrooms where some or all of the students are learning the language of instruction. For example, most classroom based assessment such as writing answers to test questions and performance based assessment such as writing explanations for mathematical solutions- measure reading and writing skills in English to the extent that, or even more than, educational knowledge and skills (Genesses and Hamayan, 1994)
The primary issue of curriculum based assessment is to thoroughly assess students’ progress towards instructional goals and objectives, therefore, curriculum based assessment is the very best measure of how much a student has mastered in the curriculum. Curriculum based assessment procedures are based on three fundamental principles: Test items must be taken from the curriculum; evaluations are repeated frequently over time; and results are used to develop instructional plans.
Curriculum based assessment procedures provide a way to monitor the effectiveness of reading comprehension instructional interventions and to identify learning problems. By using actual reading passages from curriculum, with accompanying comprehension questions, student’s ability to answer questions correctly can be assessed at regular intervals. This assessment information should be recorded on graphs, providing students and teachers with visual representation of students’ progress. By looking at these graphs, teachers can quickly see which students are not improving.
How the issues is incorporated (or not) into curricula, and assessments
Mckeon (1994) points out that meeting the standards for performance in classroom subjects will be excessively difficult for students who are learning language of instruction. They will have to perform at much higher cognitive and linguistic levels than their English-speaking matches. In designing new assessment policies and procedures, therefore, it is significant to recognize that:
- Meeting content standards is a more complex and cognitively challenging task for second language learners than it is for students who are skillful in English.
- second language learners may know as much as their English-speaking matches, but they may have knowledge and skills that are different; as Gleason (2005: 46) points out, ‘not the slightest of these accomplishments is being able to understand, speak, read, write, reason, and remember academic content in language other than English’.
Students who are learning the language of instruction are frequently not able to articulate what they have learned in the second language (Genesee and Hamayan, 1994). They may have difficulty understanding what they are being asked to do, and they usually need more time than their English-speaking peers because they often think and work in two languages. When they write in English, their teachers sometimes centers as much, or more, on their imperfect knowledge of English as on the information they are trying to communicate. As a result, approaches to assessment may need to be tailored in order to recompense for these problems and allow students to express learning in ways that do not depend completely on their proficiency in English.
Reference List
Coelho, E. (1998). Teaching and learning in multicultural schools: an integrated approach. Bristol, PA: Multilingual Matters.
Genesee, F., & Hamayan, E. (1994). Classroom-based assessment. In F. Genesee (Ed.), Educating second language children: The whole child, the whole curriculum, the whole community (pp. 212–239). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Gleason, J. B. (Ed.). (2005). The development of language (6th ed.). Boston: Pearson Education.
Jones, C. J. (2008). Curriculum-based assessment: the easy way to determine response-to-intervention. Springfield, Illinois: Charles C Thomas Publisher.
Wegerif, R., & Mercer, N. (1997). Using computer-based text analysis to integrate qualitative and quantitative methods in research on collaborative learning. Language and Education, 11, 1997.