Teaching development grants final and financial report: Building an web-based assessment database for enhancing assessment literacy among pre-service and practicing English teachers

Assessment, both formal and informal, plays a central role in language education. If done properly, it integrates seamlessly with teaching by providing teachers and students with meaningful information, and enables students to take control of their learning by focusing on the identified weaknesses. However, due to the general lack of assessment literacy among English language teachers, assessment instruments with little pedagogical and diagnostic value are widely used in primary English classrooms. This project aims to improve pre-service teachers' assessment literacy and enhance their skills to design assessment instruments with sufficient quality and variety. To work towards this goal, we propose to build a web-based, freely-accessible language assessment platform. The platform will showcase the assessment instruments innovated by students in the two courses taught by the PI, namely, “Language Assessment” and “Curriculum and Assessment” and make them accessible to practicing teachers and our graduates. The assessment instruments will be carefully tagged and categorized according to the levels of the target students (e.g. Primary 1-6), the target language skills and knowledge, and the contexts/purposes of assessment. Future students of the two courses will provide reasoned recommendations for improvement and innovate new contents for the database. Student teachers in their teaching practicum as well as alumni can use this database to identify suitable instruments for their students. We will also elicit feedbacks from current and past students in order to pass their perspectives at the frontline to future students and to adjust the syllabus of the two courses. We hope that the web-based language assessment platform will enhance the teaching & learning of language assessment.