Self Assessment In The Classroom

First of all, I would like to begin by describing my current teaching context. I work at a Language Center in a small city in Veracruz, a southern state in Mexico. A wide variety of languages is taught at this school and English in amongst them. I’m in charge of a Basic English course that has to take English as a mandatory subject because it is part of the curriculum. These group of learners takes an hour-fifteen-minute lesson from Monday to Thursday and they also have to attend the self-access center to reinforce the topics seen in class. Most of the learners in this lesson are not used to being instructed in the target language, as a result, it was difficult for them to grasp understanding of what I as saying in the first sessions.
Second,

I don’t usually administer pop quizzes as I do not believe in the effectiveness of those, however, I sometimes give my students some self-assessment worksheets in which they answer some questions about their progress to see what their strengths and weaknesses are. I think these kinds of activities are rather effective because they make learners reflect on their progress throughout the

However, the complexity of some tasks is what I sometimes criticize. In my opinion, the content validity feature is met when designing these achievement tests because they measure the topics that were covered in the course, nevertheless, the tasks the learners have to carry out in the tests at times have very little or nothing to do with the tasks that they performed in class. Thus, the learners feel frustrated and anxious as they have to face complex tasks they have not been trained for which leads to what experts call negative washback, a term that refers to the unexpected, harmful consequences of a test.
Lastly, about the feature of reliability which deals more than anything with the results of the tests. The exams that are administered are at some point reliable because they discriminate the weak from the strong candidates and there is also consistency in the scores the learners obtain in a certain period of time. However, a study needs to be conducted in order to find out whether some other human factors may affect the results obtained by the learners. There’s also a need to discuss the degree in which reliability is affected when certain protocols when administering the tests are either unknown or