Assessment and Professional Practice
Domain 5, Assessment and Professional Practice, tests your ability to select, design, and interpret assessments that align with proficiency goals, and to act ethically and collaboratively as a world-language educator.
Core rules and concepts
- Assessment types: diagnostic, formative, and summative; performance assessments and IPAs are stronger evidence of proficiency than isolated grammar quizzes.
- Technical quality: validity (measures the intended construct), reliability (consistency), and washback (effect on teaching and learning).
- Alignment: backward design starts with desired results and acceptable evidence, then plans instruction; rubrics should match the task and proficiency level.
- Professional practice: confidentiality, ethical use of data, collaboration with colleagues and families, reflective practice, and advocacy for language programs.
Worked example
A teacher’s speaking rubric has four criteria: task completion, comprehensibility, vocabulary, and grammar. Reasoning: an analytic rubric gives diagnostic feedback, but if every student scores low on grammar, the teacher should reteach that feature rather than simply record the score. The rubric must also match the level: at Novice Mid, comprehensibility and task completion should carry more weight than advanced grammatical accuracy.
Traps that cost marks
- Using a grammar-only quiz to judge interpersonal proficiency.
- Writing rubrics with vague labels (good, poor) instead of observable descriptors.
- Ignoring reliability when scoring speaking or writing.
- Treating formative assessment as a graded mini-summative.
- Letting test format, not proficiency goal, drive instruction.