What is the Assessment Task Bank?
The Assessment Task Bank is a collection of tasks held in a secure location to be used for assessment of the Certificates in Spoken and Written English. It includes tasks that have been moderated and trialled with learners to ensure that:
- they assess what they are intended to assess;
- they are of the right level of difficulty for Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) learners; and
- each task in a given competency is of equivalent difficulty.
Another function of the Task Bank is to provide models of tasks that we know are equivalent and of the right level of difficulty, so that teachers can use them as blueprints for developing their own tasks.
The decision to set up a Task Bank came from the findings of a series of National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research (NCELTR) Special Projects on assessment (1996 - 1999) investigating the tasks used for assessment in the AMEP.
What's In It?
Task Sets
The core component of the Task Bank is, of course, the assessment tasks. You will notice, however, that we refer to 'task sets'. A task set consists of a procedure for administering the task, task sheets to be given to the learners and an answer key for listening and reading tasks.
The reason for including these materials with the task sheets is because an essential part of the task is the way it is administered. By including instructions on how to administer the tasks, we can reduce the variability in the assessment. For example, the amount of time that is allowed for a reading task maybe specified or guidelines for the interlocutor in speaking tasks are given.
The reason for including answer keys with the receptive skills tasks is also to ensure that there is as little variability as possible in the way the tasks are marked. We know from the research that teachers often use different marking strategies, and some are more severe and some more lenient than others. The answer keys ensure that every answer sheet is marked using the same range of responses.
As well as the task sets and this information text, the Assessment Task Bank includes another reference document 'About Assessment' and a feedback section for you to comment on the assessment tasks and the Task Bank website in general. Your feedback is very important to us, and we are hoping that with your contributions, we can continue to build the website into a useful assessment resource.
Which Certificates?
The process of developing assessment tasks for the Task Bank grew out of the original research projects on task design and task difficulty described above.
Only Certificates II and III were targeted in the research process because at the time (1996), most learners were studying these two certificates. Tasks are now available for Certificate I and for the Course in Preliminary Spoken and Written English.
Which Competencies?
When teachers from the AMEP were requested to send samples of the tasks they used for their own assessments, we systematically received tasks for the same range of competencies. Competencies for which we seldom received samples were those which were often assessed by means other than a formal assessment task. This is the reason why some competencies are not represented in the Assessment Task Bank.
However, in an attempt to provide reliable alternative testing materials for the competencies for which there were no tasks, we set up a Special Project, 'Integrating assessment and instruction'. Teachers at ACL in Sydney and English Learning Services (ELS) in Adelaide set up their own action-research projects to investigate alternative means of assessment that would not only evaluate learners' progress but would also better inform their teaching and improve learners' awareness of their own progress. The teachers' reports will be published by NCELTR.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the enormous contributions made by teachers in the Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) to the success of these projects. We are very grateful to teachers who have willingly provided us with tasks over the years and also spent their valuable time trialling and evaluating tasks during the data collection process.
