As the communicative approach and active learning have been continuously promoted at all school levels by MEXT, more university professors and lecturers in Japan now practice performance tests as the final exam instead of traditional paper-and-pencil tests. One way to evaluate such tests is by using rubrics. While well-written rubrics can be helpful guides for teachers when evaluating and giving feedback on students’ performances, poorly written ones could make the evaluation task extremely difficult and result in unfair feedback to students. However, language instructors often have few or no opportunities to learn how to create rubrics that are easy and fair to use.
This workshop includes a short presentation and two activities to help language instructors have better understanding of the basics of language testing as well as useful techniques for creating rubrics that are user-friendly and fair. The presentation will focus on different types of language tests with respect to their purposes. Participants will then review sample rubrics and discuss characteristics of good rubrics as the first activity. In the second activity, participants will discuss and create a rubric for a provided sample performance test.
Sayo Nakamura is an educator, language testing developer, and published textbook author. She has been teaching English at universities for the past 7 years. She has also worked in the field of language testing for 10 years and has comprehensive experience in test development.
