Oxford Team 1 - Tests / Introduction to testing

Testing and evaluation

Testing and evaluation are important features of Oxford Team!. The approach to testing your students is based on three processes: reviewing and checking, testing, and an ongoing programme of continuous assessment. Oxford Team! also supports the practice of teacher self-evaluation.

Testing your students

Reviewing and checking

In the Student’s Book, there is a Revision unit after every four units.

The main aim of each Revision unit is to give your students an opportunity to look back on the work they have done and, in general terms, to reflect on how easy or difficult they found the work.

In the Workbook, there is a Progress check at the end of each unit. The main aim of each Progress check is to give your students a detailed opportunity to consider their progress, thus providing them with further opportunities to develop their capacity for self-assessment, and autonomy.

Testing

In the Teacher’s Book the tests section contains:

•twelve photocopiable end-of-unit tests

•three end-of-term progress tests

•tests answer key

Each test focuses on the main Communication, Grammar and Vocabulary content of each unit, and is designed to take about 40 minutes to complete. The marking system in each test is simple and easy to apply.

Before giving tests to your students, ensure that they are adequately prepared. Make sure that your students have done as many of the exercises in the

Student’s Book and the Workbook as possible. Also, students should complete the Progress check in the Workbook unit before they take the end-of- unit test. This is to ensure that your students have a chance to do as well as they possibly can, so that they can show you and show themselves what they do know, as well as what they do not know. Finally, you should encourage students to keep a record of their results, and of their strong and weak points.

Continuous assessment

In the Teacher’s Book there are photocopiable pages to help you carry out a programme of

Continuous assessment.

We recommend that you carry out a mixture of testing, continuous assessment and student selfassessment throughout the school year. This will enable you to keep constant track of your students’ progress, and to discover early if there are any students who need extra help in a particular area. It will also encourage students to take more responsibility for their own progress, and eventually for their own learning.

In order to help you keep an accurate record of students’ progress, we recommend that you assess their work continuously throughout the year. To do this, you may like to use our photocopiable Student profile sheet.

Make a photocopy of the sheet for each student in your class, and add a set of marks for each unit of Oxford Team! as you finish it. There is also space for you to make a note of the student’s marks in the tests.

Teacher self-evaluation

The teaching diary

Oxford Team! helps your students to develop their self-assessment skills, and also helps you to test them in more conventional ways, as described above.

However, in Oxford Team!, the process of selfassessment and self-evaluation is not confined to students. We believe that it is also very important for teachers to reflect on and consider the effectiveness of their own teaching skills. All teachers change and develop their teaching methods, and many experiment with new techniques, in order to improve their teaching.

A good way to do this is to compare your plans for each lesson with what actually happened in class. This comparison allows you to adjust your teaching to the needs and interests of your students. It also gives you the opportunity to work autonomously on improving aspects of your classroom teaching.

For these reasons, we have included a Teaching diary in the Teacher'ís Book. Using the diary will

help you keep a personal record of your own development as a teacher, with particular emphasis on the changes and improvements that you make from year to year.

1	© OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS