Wednesday, April 11, 2007

The Case of the Disappearing Scott . . .

Hello all . . . it's almost exam week! Eeep! I know that some of the students are freaking out, but I hope they are able to relax a bit before the exams. There is an optimum level of freaking out . . . you need to freak out just enough to drive you to study for the exams, but you don't want to freak out so much that you make yourself sick, and you can't perform at your best during exam time. There is a fine line between enough and too much!

I wonder if any of my students have ever taken a moment to think about where these exams actually come from. What I do in LEAP 4 is I take a survey of all of the reading we have done in the text book. I look at how long they are and how difficult they are. In order to do that, I use the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch-Kincaid_Readability_Test). That gives me a rough idea of what grade level a test is at. Once I have had a look at the type of readings the students have been doing, I then survey the tasks that they have been doing with those readings. After that, I match those readings and tasks to the Canadian Language Benchmarks (www.language.ca, I'm looking at CLB 8 and 9) and the course objectives for LEAP 4. Now I know what I am looking for and what I need to be testing. Next comes the hard part. I have to find a text. Now I do an exhaustive search looking for readings that are of the appropriate length, difficulty and topic. I also try to look for something Canadian. Once I find some articles, I share them with my fellow teachers to get their imput. After we decide which article to go with, I then begin to develop the test. In order to do that, first I re-write some of the sections / sentences of the article in order to make them more accessible. I then look at the vocabulary and choose academic words that the students should be able to guess from context. Then I pick and choose tasks from the textbooks and apply them to the reading in the text. As you can see, there should be no surprises on the final exam. The tasks all mirror tasks the students will have done in class (or at least, should have done - but they are in the textbook, so it is the responsibility of the student to study the textbook and be familiar with all of the tasks). Now I create the exam. Once that is done, I pass on an answer key and a good copy to the other teachers for their input. They come up with their feedback, and I adjust the final exam as necessary. This entire process takes about 6 - 10 hours. Crazy stuff, eh? And it's not over yet, once the students have finished the exam, I then have to check it over again and see if it worked, but that is a story for another blog . . . . . .

Study hard :-)

5 comments:

Super Saiyan said...

Yaa,...what is the case behind the disappearing of Scott. Actually if only you had come to class on Tuesday, I would not have spilled water on Pam's book :( I guess I will see you next semester because of doing that. Hopefully we will see you soon. I have just decided to blog on your comment space :)
Her I go,.....
Actually we, LEAP student, ahve done tons of stuff in these three monthes, and I think or actually it is a fact that we learned almost everything we need to learn before getting into Universoty. However, there were a couple of stuff that we were supposed to do but we did not do it. For example, one thing that Pam remineded us today with is seeing a couple of essays written by our instructors in their first years of university. Scott actually told us that he would bring us but unfortunately he did not. Also, Scott said that we would have another Fake speaking exam where he would video tape us...and unfortunately we did not do this either. Never mind..... hopefully I will not lose some marks for doing this mini Blog in an ILLIGAL SPACE. actually there is no sign that tell me not to blog her, so I should be fine :P

Ted said...

Hey Scott :
I will miss ur class in further :)

Alif said...

Now, I understand how it is difficult to prepare a question for a course!!!

Leslie said...

Hi Scott:
This time we will not freaking out exam because we know what we learned this semester. by the way,thank you your advices.

anna said...

Hello Scott,
Thank you very much for your special effort to prepare a new material for the final exams. Hopefully we'll pass them all.
Yulia