A two-stage assessment method for assessing oral language in early childhood

Abstract

Although the teaching of children's oral language is critical to both their social development and academic success, the assessment of oral language development poses many challenges for classroom teachers. The aim of the study is to develop an approach that: (i) enables teachers to assess oral language in a reliable, valid and comparable manner and (ii) provides information to support targeted teaching of oral language. The first stage of the study applies the method of pairwise comparisons to place exemplars on a scale where locations represent the quality of oral performances. The second stage involves teachers assessing oral narrative performances against the exemplars in conjunction with performance descriptors. The findings indicate that the method provides a valid and reliable way for classroom teachers to assess oral language of students aged approximately four to nine years. The assessment provides teachers with information about students' oral story-telling ability along with information about the skills that students need to learn next.

A Two‐Stage Method for Classroom Assessments of Essay Writing

“…Perhaps the most focus to date has been on judging and scaling students' writing performances (Heldsinger & Humphry, 2010;Steedle & Ferrara, 2016;van Daal, Lesterhuis, Coertjens, Donche, & De Maeyer, 2016) and students' problem solving in mathematics (Bisson, Gilmore, Inglis, & Jones, 2016;Jones & Inglis, 2015;Jones, Swan, & Pollitt, 2015). Other areas of focus have included peer assessment and feedback (Potter et al, 2017;Seery, Canty, & Phelan, 2012), the assessment of creative performances (Tarricone & Newhouse, 2016), and the assessment of oral narrative performances (Humphry, Heldsinger, & Dawkins, 2017). There has also been some research into the application of pairwise comparisons in setting grade boundaries (Benton & Elliot, 2016).…”

A Two-Stage Method for Obtaining Reliable Teacher Assessments of Writing

“…In this early work, performance descriptors were not provided as a complement to the exemplars. The reliability of judgements using this method, and including performance descriptors, were subsequently investigated for oral language in early childhood (Humphry et al, 2017) and for essay writing in primary students (Humphry and Heldsinger, 2019). The present study extends the previous research to investigate the reliability of the methodology in the context of narrative writing obtained from students aged 5-12.…”

“…The aim of the research reported here is to collect empirical evidence about the reliability of teacher judgements of narrative writing assessment using a specific two-stage assessment method that has been used in three previous studies (Heldsinger and Humphry, 2013;Humphry et al, 2017;Humphry and Heldsinger, 2019). In the first stage, a large sample of performances are calibrated using the method of pairwise comparison.…”

Young Children's Language uses during Play and Implications for Classroom Assessment

“…Löfdahl & Hägglund, 2006), use of argumentative and narrative discourse features (e.g. Humphry, Heldsinger & Dawkins, 2017;Zadunaisky Ehrlich & Blum-Kulka, 2014) and functions of language in young children's play (e.g. Tough, 1976).…”