چکیده:
This study investigated the impact of Iranian EAP teachers’ familiarity with or knowledge of alternative assessment (AA), teaching experience, academic degree and gender on their assessment literacy. To this end, 106 EAP teachers (74 males and 32 females) holding PhD degree (N=77) or MA/MSc degree (N=29) in different fields of study selected based on convenience sampling, participated in the study. The participants completed Classroom Assessment Literacy Inventory (CALI) developed by Mertler and Campbell (2005). The results of descriptive statistics indicated that observation, as one form of AA, was used most frequently by EAP teachers. The results of Independent Samples t-test showed that EAP teachers’ knowledge of AA significantly differentiated them in terms of assessment literacy. The results of Independent Samples t-test further showed that there was no significant difference between male and female EAP teachers regarding their assessment literacy, while EAP teachers who held Ph.D. degree possessed significantly higher levels of assessment literacy compared to their MA/MSc-holding counterparts. Moreover, the results of one-way ANOVA indicated that EAP teachers’ years of teaching experience had no significant effect on their assessment literacy. The interview results also indicated that half of the participants were either unfamiliar (33%), or had low familiarity (17%) with AA. It was also revealed that lack of knowledge of AA and overcrowded classes were two main reasons for the EAP teachers’ lack of use of AA. Furthermore, the majority of the participants who did not use AA, reported they mainly used summative assessment instead.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Brookhart (2011) maintains that, to be effective and good assessors, teachers should, among other things, be able to analyze tests, questions, and assessment tasks to become sure about the knowledge and skills needed by the students to do them, be able to provide effective feedback on the students’ activities, possess the skills to construct scoring schemes that measure students’ performance on classroom assessment which eventually provide useful information for decision making about the students, be able to make the interpretations of assessment results appropriate to the specific context, possess the skills to help students use assessment results to make sound decisions, and understand and observe their ethical responsibilities in the process of assessment, all of which help shape their assessment literacy.
Instruments In the present study, a mixed methods design including a semi-structured interview and a questionnaire survey were adopted to investigate the impact of Iranian EAP teachers’ knowledge of alternative forms of assessment, their teaching experience, gender and academic degree on their assessment literacy.
Data Analysis To answer the first research question of the study, descriptive statistics and frequency analysis, obtained from the responses to the third question of the interview, were employed to estimate the type of alternative forms of assessment adopted by Iranian EAP teachers.
Table 2: Descriptive Statistics demonstrating the Assessment Literacy of EAP Teachers With and Without Familiarity with AA {مراجعه شود به فایل جدول الحاقی} The results of the Independent Samples t-test comparing the two groups are presented in Table 3.