As stated on the British Council Vietnam page, the Vietnam Language Assessment Symposium aims to provide "insights into English language assessment issues and trends in Vietnam." One of our Beijing-based consultants, Jonathan Dixon, presented a paper entitled Teachers as Stakeholders in Assessment. The abstract for this paper is as follows:
Teachers as stakeholders in assessment
The range of stakeholders who contribute to test validity is diverse and each has the potential to affect test validity and learning success at different stages in the test cycle from construct definition and test design through to score use and decision-making (Fulcher, 2012; O’Loughlin, 2013; Inbar-Lourie, 2013; Taylor, 2013). Typical stakeholders include testing practitioners such as test designers and developers, item writers, and raters, as well as non-practitioners like test-takers, admissions officers and writers of test preparation materials.
This presentation provides a brief overview of the range of stakeholders before focusing on a group of stakeholders who play a key role not only in ensuring test validity but also in facilitating learning success when preparing their students to take high-stakes tests: teachers. The discussion addresses the questions of what the teacher’s role is in the overall test cycle and how educators might impact test validity before considering what teachers need to know about assessment and testing in order to have a beneficial impact on their pupils’ learning of English.
The paper draws on previous work by assessment practitioners in the British Council that used an evidence-based approach that employed participatory, collaborative instruments to generate language assessment knowledge profiles of EAP teachers based in East Asia.
References
Cooke, S., Barnett, C. & Rossi, O. (2017). An evidence-based approach to generating the Language Assessment Literacy profiles of diverse stakeholder groups. Presentation at LTRC, Bogota, Colombia, 2017.
Fulcher, G. (2012). Assessment literacy for the language classroom. Language Assessment Quarterly, 9:2, 113-132, doi: 10.1080/15434303.2011.642041
Inbar-Lourie, O. (2013). Guest Editorial to the special issue on language assessment literacy. Language Testing, 30(3), 301–307. doi:10.1177/0265532213480126
O’Loughlin, K. (2013). Developing the assessment literacy of university proficiency test users. Language Testing 30(3), 363-380. doi:10.1177/0265532213480336
Taylor, L. (2013). Communicating the theory, practice and principles of language testing to test stakeholders: Some reflections. Language Testing 30(3), 403-412. doi: 10.1177/0265532213480338