Department of German

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

1. This statement differs from the Intended Use Specifications for assessment in Levels I-III in the following ways:
- It pertains to a small group of courses rather than to only one course (with an intensive and a non-intensive version). At its April 30, 1999 faculty meeting, the Department designated the following five courses as belonging to Level IV: Text in Context (mandatory for majors), the two current Business courses, Topics for Oral Proficiency, and one literature course. These courses share an emphasis on discourse phenomena and textuality that is manifested differently in each course. In addition they set their own focus which will have to be reflected in their assessment practices (e.g., speaking in a professional context, in public settings, writing that reflects literary/cultural interpretation). This emphasis is intended to prepare students for acquiring various abilities and sensitivities and contribute to an academic literacy.
- Since these courses have not yet been taught with the newly agreed upon common emphasis, this document is an attempt to specify highly recommended practices in assessment and to identify work that should be initiated by instructors of Level IV courses prior to the fall semester and further refined by them over the course of the academic year 1999-2000.

2. Four major areas of assessment apply to all Level IV courses: 
- oral presentations,
- writing,
- class participation,
- homework and quizzes. 
It was agreed that, together, oral and written work should constitute about half of the final grade, with the other half coming from class participation and homework. In a specific course oral and written work combined might be weighted up to 60% percent. However, that maximum should not be exceeded since steady engagement in class and outside of is critical for success in these courses. 

3. Because of their emphasis on discourse features and textuality, Level IV courses must build upon a number of intricately interrelated and at times sequenced pedagogical tasks that raise students’ awareness of and ability to use those features. These tasks should focus on prominent characteristics of public discourse (monologic and interactive), textual organization, genre, the relationship of author stance and intention to language use, expanded syntactic patterns, and differentiated thematic vocabulary, including, as appropriate, special characteristics of literary language. 

4. Students’ ability to produce high-level oral and written language is enhanced through the opportunity to practice and perform a series of previously identified subcomponents or subskills (e.g., through class activities and/or homework assignments). In both cases group feedback as well as individual feedback are essential. In the case of written work, feedback is provided directly on the first draft and on correction sheets that are prepared for distribution as the first draft is returned. They summarize some of the major areas in need of improvement (usually systemic issues in syntax, morphology and discoursal aspects) and exemplify nuances in expressions through semantic fields and by linking them with appropriate contexts/genres/registers. In the course of the semester increased emphasis should be placed on fixed collocations, idioms, and metaphors that reflect linguistic-cultural preferences so that students may begin to emulate native-like selection choices. 

5. At this level, the curriculum’s overall emphasis on students’ responsibility for their own learning becomes more prominent as students set specific individual learning goals within the course goals and objectives. The following are highly recommended practices: 
- an initial questionnaire that reflects students’ perception of their abilities at the beginning of the course; 
- a mid-semester meeting that provides individual feedback in line with the student’s personal learning goals and allows for adjustments in pedagogical approach and instructional emphases for the whole group on the part of the teacher; 
- a final retrospective questionnaire, preferably combined with a conference. 

6. As students progress through the curriculum their performance profiles are likely to become highly divergent even though they are appropriately enrolled in a particular course. This means that instructors and students, as a group and as individuals, need to work out a plan that allows the whole class and individual students to attain the stated global goals for the course. At the same time this individually tailored plan takes into consideration that a number of aspects of an individual student’s performance need to be brought into careful balance. In general, these are background knowledge, cognitive abilities, particularly forms of academic and textual literacy, and linguistic abilities. With regard to the latter, there is strong evidence for a need to balance carefully diverse extended and focused speaking, reading, and writing tasks and to differentiate these further with regard to task complexity, task difficulty and performance conditions. It is critical to continue to work toward a balance between accuracy, fluency, and complexity of language use, something that is crucial for continued interlanguage development toward target language norms by the advanced learner. 

7. Given the different foci of the Level IV courses, the varying profiles of each class, and of individual students in it, instructors should determine for themselves, how to go about assuring that learners do, in fact, follow a plan that is most appropriate for them and how they wish to recognize students’ engagement and success. However, that determination needs to be made early on in the semester on the basis of classroom observation and individual consultation and needs to be conveyed as early as possible to the students. Most importantly, it needs to be put into practice at each occasion for assessment and feedback. Thus, a particular course may include a number of quizzes to establish factual knowledge, while another may rely more on homework assignments to assure appropriate preparation. One course may determine that progress in writing is of particular importance, given a somewhat weaker start. Another may emphasize accuracy in certain specified areas as a key course goal. Finally, some students may benefit from a more formal approach to self-reflection, e.g., through regular e-mail journals at stated intervals. In other words, level of engagement through self-reflection, classroom participation, and quality and punctuality of homework may take on a particularly prominent role in assessment. 
It is difficult to know how students would respond to an approach that would state the precise weighting of the four categories for assessment only two to three weeks into a course. However, this might be worth exploring given students’ interest in individualized treatment and recognition of and reward for serious engagement in a course. 

ORAL PRESENTATIONS: Between 20 and 30% 
Two major kinds of oral presentations are envisioned: 
- A pair or group project, 
- An individual presentation/project. 
Each presentation is seen as the end result of a process that has followed a number of carefully spelled out stages. Together, these constitute a progression of increasing challenge to students’ oral language use. 
Thus, for each of these oral tasks (e.g, panel discussion, debate, report, summary, textual analysis), suitable developmental stages and intermediate deadlines will be established and assessment criteria appropriate for the activity will be jointly developed by the students and the instructor in "assessment sheets." These flexible "assessment sheets" should address and specify the following categories, as appropriate: 

content; organization; syntactic complexity; lexical appropriateness and diversity; fluency of delivery; accuracy; nature of audience involvement.

Who uses the assessment?
Students, in order to ascertain the extent to which they are able to perform orally according to the guidelines and quality criteria established for the task. Instructors, in order to monitor progress in students’ production abilities at the appropriate level, taking into consideration aspects of accuracy, fluency, of complexity in the oral performance. 

What is assessed? (See point # 3 above) 
Content knowledge, ability to employ important features of public discourse (monologic and interactive language), textual organization, appropriateness of language use as related to communicative intention, complexity and variation in syntactic patterns, differentiated thematic vocabulary — including, as appropriate, technical terminology — , degree of audience participation, and level of preparation; use of supporting materials that are appropriate for public presentations (overheads, outlines, visuals, graphs); accuracy, fluency, and complexity in the major areas. Because this is planned speech, all three should be higher than in spontaneous classroom discourse. 

Who/what is being impacted?
Student presenter, through the feedback received in the categories indicated above which translates into a grade; determination of emphasis areas in future work; motivation to take personal responsibility for future progress; instructors, in order to gauge the extent to which their pedagogical approach and the in-class and out of class assignments have been successful for the group as a whole and for individual students with their particular learning needs and goals, and to determine what kind of instructional interventions may still be called for. 

Intended consequences 
Practice with extended speaking in public genres; expanded knowledge base on specified topics; sense of accomplishment in rehearsed language use which should translate into greater confidence in spontaneous speaking; interrelationship between reading, writing, and speaking.

WRITING: Between 20 and 30%

A process writing approach is continued in Level IV courses. It has two aspects. 
1. It means that two grades will be assigned for each writing task. At least three writing assignments, approximately 5-7 pages in length, should be given. As with the oral presentations, students and teachers jointly arrive at assessment criteria and their weighting. Major categories are: content, rhetorical organization, syntactic complexity, variation, and accuracy, lexical appropriateness and variation; mechanics of writing. Over the course of the semester the relative weight of categories and the particular emphases may shift in line with instructional foci, student strengths and weaknesses, and group and individual needs with regard to interlanguage development. 
2. The process writing approach extends beyond the two versions of individual writing assignments to the whole corpus of essays produced by each student over the course of the semester. Thus assessment of writing includes a component of "progress" that considers the students’ initial and end-of-semester writing ability. 

Who uses the assessment?
Students, in order to determine the extent to which they are increasing their content knowledge that is central to the topic/unit or to a particular writing assignment, and are expanding their organizational abilities and their linguistic facility in terms of the previously identified criteria; instructors, in order to determine the whole group’s progress in writing in line with the specified criteria and the individual students’ ability to enhance their language in areas of weakness or to foster greater expressiveness.

What is assessed?
See the categories above. Also, in the second version of a writing assignment, the extent to which students are able to use teacher feedback and translate it into more competently written work. 

Who/what is being impacted?
The class cohort as a whole; the individual students, as manifested in their grades and through greater specificity of recommendations to them regarding the areas in which they need to focus additional out-of class and in-class work. 

Intended consequences 
Closer approximation of an expected level of quality writing as specified in the "assessment sheets", in terms of content, organization, and language use, an expectation that varies, among other things, by the topic, genre, audience, and intention; gradual development of a personal writing style; greater confidence as a result of practice and forward movement with regard to accuracy and complexity of language use; internalization of quality criteria, which is expected to influence the deployment of strategically focused attention for all future work, whether teacher-directed or individual. 

CLASS PARTICIPATION: Approximately 25 %

Who uses the assessment?
Instructors use assessment of class participation in order to encourage students to contribute actively to the class discourse and to their interlanguage development in German, particularly their interactive spoken German. This input in the form of students’ classroom language use becomes the basis for instructional choices made by the teacher. Students use it in order to gauge the extent to which their contributions to class discourse enhance everyone’s learning, from the standpoint of content and of language. 

What is assessed?
Quality of content and of language are being assessed, as is a spirit of cooperation on the part of the students. Also, indirectly, the extent and quality of homework preparation are assessed through this category. 

Who/what is being impacted?
Students are most directly affected through the grades. Instructors are affected since their relationship to the class is, to a large extent, expressed by class participation grades for the whole group. 

Intended consequences 
One important intended consequence is to encourage students to understand that the ability to use language at a high level depends critically on their consistent and ongoing willingness to use available class time to the greatest extent possible. Assessment of class participation not only serves that purpose but also leads to continued reassessment on the part of the teachers of the extent to which the various pedagogical tasks do or do not encourage students to participate in a lively fashion.  

HOMEWORK AND QUIZZES: Approximately 25%

Who uses the assessment?
Both teachers and students use this assessment category to gauge the quality, extent, and consistency of students’ work and its efficacy in terms of leading to better performance in a number of previously specified areas. 

What is assessed?
Consistency, seriousness, and level and quality of engagement on the part of the students are assessed by a simple "check", "plus" or "minus" designation for homework assignments. The tasks assessed under this rubric are distinct from the other homework assignments (particularly writing) inasmuch as they address various subskills or focus on specific aspects of language use. In addition, the assessment category "homework and quizzes" seeks to provide a measure of students’ willingness to develop increased accuracy, greater fluency, and also increased complexity of language use. 
Quizzes are primarily intended to address students’ acquisition of factual knowledge within a certain topic, and to direct language use toward certain forms and certain levels of accuracy. 

Who/what is being impacted?
Students, through grades; teachers, who ascertain the extent of students’ engagement and subsequently adjust their instructional approaches and emphases so as to assure students’ success. This practice also minimizes guilt feelings on the part of students if their progress is not as high as expected or hoped for because of a different profile of abilities at the beginning of the semester than that of other classmates. 

Intended consequences 
No grade is given to homework, only check, pluses or minuses are indicated. This kind of non-graded assessment is intended to signal to students that the teacher values their creative experimentation and their consistent work throughout the semester, not only their accuracy. All areas of language use can be targeted, in terms of higher levels of accuracy, complexity, or fluency of language use. 
By comparison, graded quizzes signal to students the importance and expectation of timely and active preparation for class. Such feedback and substantive evaluation also reiterates that advanced language learning requires continuous engagement with a variety of German language tasks in and out of class and emphasizes that students need to perform these tasks with punctuality, discipline, and precision in order to improve their performance profile to the greatest extent possible.

Compiled by Heidi Byrnes, July 17, 1999