Designing a test

Specs Listening: 5 mins.
Format: teacher reviews the test with the students before beginning.
Task: the student follows the reading and formulates questions.

Reading: 10 mins.
Format: before answering, the student needs to read instructions and the options given.
Task: read in order to complete the exam.

Writing: 20 mins.
Format: select correct word, write missing word, and write sentences.
Task: fill in blanks and formulate sentences. Test

Answer Key

Narrative The process of performance of our test, made us go back and revise every exercise we developed during this semester. Every project we handed in, ended up being a part of our test. The type of text, we found more adequate, was the achievement test. Then we revised the objectives and purposes of the exercises that we had developed and created activities directly from those exercises in this case, part I was taken from a vocabulary activity; part II and III were about grammar and part IV was writing. The level that we worked on was for 7th grade. Given the high number of students in that level and the short length of available class time, we decided to develop a test that was easy to complete and also easy to grade. For the first part of our test we designed a direct activity with a discrete objective, so that the students would not feel overwhelmed; since only one right answer could be given, it turned out to be unbiased. Since the words were already provided, no grammar was taken in count there. The difficulty grade was low, therefore we assigned it just 1 point of importance. For activity II, we wanted to grade grammar, specifically their grasp of verbs in the past tense. Again, we made it straight, discrete and impartial. As well as in activity 1, we focused on reading and writing skills. Since it was a longer activity, we assigned a 4 points value. For activity III, we also focused in grammar but it was a merge between activity I and II because although the words were provided, the students needed to select the right order it is a direct, discrete and clear task that required reading and writing skills. We assigned it a 3 points value. For activity IV we wanted to grade writing skills, and for that we designed an activity where the students had to build the whole sentences within grading limitations on what they write. The aspects of this activity are that it is direct, discrete and partly subjective, given that they can choose what they write first bur the options are limited and only 5 possible options. We assigned a 2 points value.

Comments by moderator The comments of our moderator were minimum and reduces to some grammar corrections and few format mistakes that we have been corrected.