Making continuous assessment sustainable in large classes

In my striving to make my classes as inclusive, nonviolent and sociocratic as possible, I have been thinking about how to incorporate continuous assessment for speaking without making it about performance and judgement. However, I have come across a few logistic difficulties that I am trying to overcome. The following post is a list of thoughts and ideas I am exploring to make continuous assessment not only effective for the learners, but sustainable for the teacher too, especially in large classes.

The problem with traditional oral testing

I have long felt that the traditional form of oral testing in Italian schools (“interrogazione”) is not very productive: it is stressful for both teacher and learner, it results in a lot of lost learning opportunities for the rest of the class (as while one is being tested, the other students are doing something else altogether), and most of all it puts way too much pressure on learners’ on-the-spot performance, worsening their already-high affective filter. I have therefore decided to drop it completely or use it as sparsely as possible, in order to substitute it with continuous assessment.

What do I mean by continuous assessment?

Before I continue, let me briefly clarify how I envisage continuous assessment in my classes.

The first part of the assessment would be class participation. Ideally, I would like to take notes of learner participation in the class conversation: who contributes and how. I would then sum up these contributions and award a mark to each learner who has participated at least three times say once every two weeks or every 6-8 classes. Or in any case keep these notes in mind once I have to award a mark to learners.

The second form of assessment would be pair or group work. When I ask learners to work in pairs or groups to discuss or work on a task, I would like to monitor their work and again take notes. These notes would add to the notes from class participation to would become a mark on the register every x-number of classes or weeks.

I believe that this type of assessment would not only reflect more closely the learners’ actual language ability as measured over a period of time, it would also encourage learners’ participation in class, and (hopefully) allow them to relax and feel less judged, knowing that they will always have another opportunity in case they don’t do well in one task/activity. It would also avoid the dreaded “walk to the teacher’s desk” and encourage all learners to practice the language as much as possible — another issue I have had with many classes.

The technical difficulties of carrying out continuous assessment in large classes

However, I have come across a few technical hurdles in designing this type of testing in a state school environment. Firstly, every school year I teach six classes of between 20-25 students each, which means I have to keep records of assessment for about 100-120 students at the time. How can I do that with continuous assessment (i.e. keeping a number of assessment records per student) and without making my life an unsustainable hell of notes, marks, and rules that I need to drop half-way through or that is prone to many mistakes and oversights?

Also, if I get all the class to discuss or speak at the same time in small groups, I have realised that some learners are very difficult to hear, as they speak very softly and/or tend to avoid speaking when I get closer to them. Or else if I ask open-class questions, it’s always the same people answering, making it difficult to have a similar number of assessment records for all the learners in the class.

Possible solutions

After thinking about it for a while, I have come up with a series of ideas and solutions, which I will try to implement with my next classes. These are only tentative and will need to be adjusted for the class size, level and personality. However, I am confident at least some of these will end up working and making my students more talkative, and my assessment fairer and more stress-free:

• Discuss and clarify rules at the beginning of the school year: by making sure that most learners are on board with the idea and practice of continuous assessment at the beginning of the year, I think it might make it easier for learners to speak up and try to express themselves, knowing that their final mark will mainly depend on their willingness to speak and participate in class activities and discussions;
• Take 5 minutes at the end of each lesson to take assessment notes: since the assessment techniques I have mentioned above require a lot of notetaking, and often between lessons I need to rush from one classroom to the next, I could finish each class 3-5 minutes earlier in order to take the time to write down learner participation and level of performance for that specific class.
• Use shorthand for notes: since writing long-form notes might take up too much time and space, I would like to come up with a simple shorthand to use for my notes, in order to refer to my assessment scales and help me award a summary mark at the end of the given period.
• Share notes and comments with students: in order to make this process as fair and learner-centred as possible, I would ideally like to share the comments I write and the learners’ performance with them every time, so that they know where they are, what to expect and how to improve. This might prove quite hard to do, especially in larger classes, but I might simply create a shared document that learners can read at the end of every class rather than taking time with each individual learner to give them feedback.

If you have any other ideas or techniques that you have tried, I would be more than happy to read them in the comments and to try to incorporate them in my teaching.