Understanding Evaluation, Assessment, and Testing

Regarding assessment, this is a term that is part of the evaluation. Nunan (2004, p118) states that: “assessment is taken to refer to the set of processes by which we judge students learning”.  According to Tom Angelo (1995), assessment is: “an ongoing process aimed at understanding and improving student learning”. Based on these two definitions, it is clear that assessment is related more specifically to the students and the group of methods that are used to judge their performance. In this case, both teachers and students are involved in the assessment process. Teachers usually make use of activities, tests and exercises to assess students, not only how well they are doing but also, for identifying what factors are causing their success or failure. And students make use of self-assessment and peer assessment in order to identify by themselves and with the help of their peers which are their strengths and weaknesses and also for identifying the ways of learning and materials they like the most. Depending on the results of the teacher’s assessment and student’s self assessment, different actions and changes can be made after analyzing these results during the evaluation of the process.

The other concept that is usually misunderstood and sometimes used to refer to the ones described above is testing.  Loannou and Pavlou, state that “testing is one of the procedures that can be used to assess child’s performance. A test has a certain objective, for example, to see to what extent a child understand a written text.” (Loannou and Pavlou, 2003, p.4). John Norris in his article about Purposeful language Assessment, offers the following definition of testing: “Language tests are simply instruments or procedures for gathering particular kinds of information, typically information having to do with students’ language abilities.” (Norris, 2003, P1) As we can see testing is the most specific of the three procedures. This is one of many different instruments that can be used to assess students’ performance. Tests are selected taking into account a specific objective depending on what needs to be tested, and what exactly are we looking for. That is why, the teacher is the one who is in charged of deciding what kind of test will use and also the one in charged of testing students through different instruments including tasks, quizzes and exercises.

To conclude it can be said that evaluation, assessment, and testing keep a relation but do not mean the same. Evaluation is the most general of the three concepts including assessment as one of the procedures to gather information that will be used in the evaluation. The other procedure is testing. This is part of assessment and is one of the many instruments the teacher can use to assess students’ performance. Having clear all this allows teachers not only clarify the meaning of each concept but the characteristics they have, when they are needed, what for they are used, who are in charged of them     and how these procedures can be carried out during the teaching learning-process which let him/her make better use of the three procedures previously described.