When a semester or final exam period arrives, I do a story that goes through the phases of the star, just as in a normal Invisibles class. An exam period of two or three hours is perfect for that. I. therefor assess in a way that accurately reflects my instruction, as the research indicates is best.
Therefore, a typical summative examination in my classroom would look like this:
PREPARATION (100 minutes): (a) the students build a story with you in the Create phase. (b) once the story is finished, go through to however far you can get around the star. This depends on the length of the extended testing period. In a two-hour testing period this set-up work would last 40 minutes. In a three-hour testing period (180 minutes) this would be a 100-minute set-up. Just go around the star without worrying how far you get – the time will get gobbled up.
Then leave yourself the remaining 80 minutes for the testing part, as follows:
Section 1: WRITING (20 minutes): The students write what they heard in English for 20 minutes. Note here that there are no correct answers, nothing to prepare for, no memorization by the students, who are during exam time being bombarded with that need in all their other classes.
All the kids have to do is show up for the exam, ready for success because you have trained them so well during the months leading up to the exam. You thus uphold your promise made at the start of the year that all they have to do is listen and focus and you will do the work and
there are no right answers, just their own experience with the language, and you will grade them in that way.
While they are writing in Section 2 of the exam period, you have 20 minutes to write up the story given to you by the storywriter into the target language.
Section 2: TRANSLATION (20 minutes): Put the story, now in the TL, up on the document camera and they are given 20 minutes to translate it.
The reader may have noticed that the students could at this point during the exam period, with the translated text right there in front of them, “improve” what they wrote in Section 2. That’s good. It encourages them to go deeper with their reading of the text on the document camera. Exams should teach kids things, not shame them for not being able to memorize things.
Section 3: QUIZ (20 min.): The students take a 20-question quiz provided by the quiz writer who wrote it in normal fashion during the building of the story in the Create phase earlier. The quiz writer has to be on her toes to fashion such a long quiz with so many questions, but it is easily done if the quiz writer works hard enough to craft the quiz while the story is being created.
Section 4: DICTEE (20 min.): Give them a dictée that you read from the story handed to you by the story writer. In other words, just do what you do in a regular class but put it into a written testing format as described herein, with big spaces on the testing paper, front and back on one sheet of paper, with room for the students to do Sections 1 and 2 of the exam on the front and Sections 3 and 4 on the back.
This kind of exam doesn’t waste time! The testing time is used for learning! And the kids really enjoy a successful testing experience because they are doing the same thing that they did in the classroom all term long.
