ASSESSMENT. ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND TYPES

Assessment is a crucial component of education. Regardless of the subject, we come across it in every course or lesson. Assessment is essentialin helping both students and teachersto find out how much students have learnt and how well they can apply their knowledge, whether it takes the form of a quick quiz, group project,midterm or final exam. It is beneficial for students to recognisetheir own accomplishments and opportunities for development. It gives educators information about how successful their teaching strategies are. But grades are not the only one aspect of assessment. It also involves growth, understanding and developing the skills needed for a future use. To have a better understanding of assessment, let’s look at its characteristics. 1. Assessment needs to be reasonable. This implies that any form of assessment should evaluate skills that need to be measured. For example, if the aim of assessment to measure speaking skills of a student it should have a focus solely on the ability of a student to speak and express their opinion in a foreign language freely and appropriately. 2. Another important quality of assessment is reliability. Reliability refers to being trustworthy, dependable. It means that assessment will give the same outcome if conducted under similar circumstances. For instance, if students’ knowledge have not changed, the scores on an English test that has the same difficulty today and another one that is given the following week should be comparable. 3. Assessment should be fair. This aspect means that every student has an equal right to be assessed successfully. When evaluating a learner teacher should not assess them based on their ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, background, or any other social factor. Fairness ensures that every students’ ability is assessed accurately and rationally. 4. Finally, assessment should provide space for feedback. It can be presented in different ways: grades, comments or advices for future improvement. It allows students and teachers to find out weaknesses and strengths of the learning and make changes if needed. Next thing we are going to discuss: types of assessment. It can be produced in various ways and each of them has a distinct purpose. Here are the basic and important ones: 1. Formative assessment. It is assessment conducted on a daily basis, to track the achievements and perfomance of a student. To understand how well he or she understands and applies new information. Such form of assessment can be presented in different ways, such as quizzes, tests, group projects, exercises, speaking activities etc. Usually it does not have any effect on the final grade of the lesson or a course. 2.Summative assessment. This type of assessment is conducted in the end of the learning period, like the ending of a semester, term or a quarter. Unlike formative assessment, summative assessment’s results form a final grade of a course and it cannot be changed. Summative assessment helps to evaluate overall achievement of a student throughout the learning process. This assessment usually consists of harder tasks that test all 4 main skills, that are important in acquiring English language (Speaking, Writing, Reading and Listening). 3. Peer-assessment. During this assessment classmates or groupmates assess each other's performances. 4.Self- assessment. Assessment when a learner evaluates his own performance. Both these types of assessment can encourage and motivate students because it gives them some sort of power over their own process of learning. It also fosters critical thinking and teaches learners to reflect on their own mistakes. It helps them to better understand how assessment works and how to evaluate effectively and fairly. 5. Diagnostic assessments. There is a type of assessment that assess acquired knowledge not in the end of learning period or during it. It assess students before the begging of a school, university or a private courses. The most clear example it is a test of students’ level of English. It helps to find out the strengths of a students’ knowledge or gaps from previous education, so educators can suit the lessons and the materials to the learners’ abilities. To sum up the theme of the article, I would like to state: Assessment it is not just obligation but a tool for academic growth and success. It is a way to see improvement not only from teachers’ perspective, but from students’ too. It is a great 311 method to motivate learners and develop healthy competition between classmates in order for them to reach their goals both academic and personal.