| March 2010 home | PDF Journal |

Volume 12. Issue 1
Article 9

Title
Investigating the relationship between Self-assessment and teacher-assessment in a academic contexts.

Authors
Mansoor Tavakoli

Mansoor Tavakoli: has a PhD in TEFL from Isfahan University. He is an assistant professor and has taught English at Isfahan University for 12 years. His research interests are language teaching and assessment.

Abstract
The main purpose of the present study is to investigate the relationship between performance testing and alternative assessment. More specifically, the study addressed the following questions: 1) Is there any correlation between student self-rating and teacher-rating in a speaking test? 2) Is there any correlation between student self assessment and teacher assessment of speaking in informal settings? And 3) How much correlation exists between interview and classroom informal assessments? The participants of the study were 35 sophomores majoring in English literature, who had to enroll for a speaking course, which was compulsory and prerequisite for other courses. Their oral performances were observed via narration task throughout the term, and they all participated in an interview test administered at the end of the course for assessing their general speaking ability. The subjects’ speech production in the classroom was scored using both holistic and discrete marking procedures. As a consequence of running Pearson correlation, a number of interesting findings emerged:  Except the correlation between self-rating and teacher-rating on an interview test, which was moderate, all of the correlations among other variables such as self-rating and self-classroom assessment; teacher-rating and teacher-classroom assessment; and self-assessment and teacher-classroom assessment were high. And thus, high correlations among these measures indicate that alternative assessment such as self-assessment is likely to be as reliable and as valid as performance testing. The implication that can be drawn from the findings of this study is that, in order to make a plausible link between performance testing and informal assessment, we have to move further toward authentic assessment which is more relevant to classroom evaluation in academic contexts.

Keywords: Alternative assessment, Performance testing, Self-assessment, Teacher-assessment, Self-rating, Teacher-rating