Lecture by Judith Liskin-Gasparro, September 15, 2000

Testing for Performance, Skill, and Knowledge in a Foreign Language: Finding the Balance

by Dr. Judith Liskin-Gasparro, Associate Professor and Director of the General Education Program Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Iowa

We test our students for many reasons:  to motivate them to study harder, enable them to display their skills and knowledge, and to help them synthesize and integrate their learning.  Tests also serve us, the instructors:  they provide us with information for grading, and students’ performance on tests helps us assess how well we are meeting our instructional goals.
This three-hour workshop will touch on all of these areas by focusing on two topics: 1) how to match our evaluation activities, both the tests themselves and how we score them, to the content and approaches of instruction; and 2) how to design performance assessments that evaluate the more global and holistic aspects of language ability.

Friday, September 15, 2000