The Bob System: Tracking students for formative assessment

I am often called on to teach oral English. Unlike teaching written English where the students will be submitting a lot of writing samples, oral English offers less opportunity to sample the students' English ability.

My primary interest in using the Bob System and some sort of scoring system is in formative assessment.

When I have a clear understanding of how they are doing then I have the ability to try to make my training more effective in two ways.

First, are my students "getting it"? Am I helping them to learn what will be useful for them to know?

Second, I can customize my training more to my students' specific needs. I may not be able to give each student individual training (that ability and technology will be coming in the future) but I could segment the class. I want to know who is doing well and who is doing poorly.

When I know this I can offer extra training to those who need extra help. What about students who are doing very well in the class? Sometimes there is an academic ceiling in the classroom. Bright students cannot go higher because the teacher is teaching to the "middle level" of the class. But if we know which students are doing very well and how many of them there are then we can focus on their needs better by providing extra challenge.

Tracking this sort of information can be very useful in other ways, as of Action Research in the classroom. If you are monitoring many aspects of the student's performance in the classroom and you have a student who always participates correctly, does the pairwork, groupwork, homework, listens and doesn't goof off but does not seem to progress in their English from one term to the next then that would raise some very good questions for the teacher.

Of course, finally, the data that is collected can help in summative assessment. The teacher does not need to simply rely on a final exam for a score. The teacher will have a multidimensional way to look at the students.

[Photo: Some of my 300 college students that I taught weekly last term doing pairwork. Next term I will have 400 college students each week.]