Alex Thorp’s ‘Psychology of Assessment – Best Practice in EAP’

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Lucy Muirhead

I don’t know why, but it took me a while to really understand how to ‘personalise’ my lessons. Fresh off my TEFL course, I suppose that I was so concerned with creating exciting, innovative, all singing and dancing lessons, that I missed who my students were and what they really needed. I spent hours writing out role plays for contrived scenarios, creating worksheet exercises about Alans, Peters and Marys, and making gap fills for songs that I didn’t even like. Well, it was exhausting. Then, as I started to see that each student in my class was a person with their own motivations, strengths & weaknesses, insecurities and passions, I realised that I needed to ‘personalise’. I sometimes personalised the content of my classes to the point where there were up to six different lessons going on at the same time. Well, that was even more exhausting. So I stopped. I embarked on a kind of ‘teaching unplugged’, just going into class with my knowledge of the language and a few tricks up my sleeve and seeing what emerged. This was where I finally learnt to listen to my students and find out who they were.  My lessons became about them as learners rather than about me as the teacher.

Yet I park most of that at the door when I am teaching exam courses. I concentrate on exam techniques and sympathising about how hard it can all be. I have to work extra hard at personalising the content, finding tenuous links to real-world scenarios and figuring out ways to keep my students motivated… And we’re back again to: how exhausting!

So I was suddenly struck when I went to Alex Thorp’s talk: ‘Psychology of Assessment – Best Practice in EAP’. Do we engage the test-taker as a psychological being? he asked. Who is the test-taker other than just a person in an exam room? How might the test and the preparation impact them? Hmm, good points. And bizarrely, such obvious points too so why aren’t we all discussing them?

To help us understand, Alex took us through a brief overview of the 5 learning paradigms of the past century, plus a newly emerging one:

  1. Behaviourist – new behaviours are developed through connections made between stimuli and responses. (the learner is passive)
  2. Cognitivist – humans are rational beings whose thinking leads to their actions. (the mind is a computer)
  3. Constructionist – new information is linked to prior knowledge from subjective experiences. (learners are information constructors)
  4. Humanist – the needs and emotions of learners are intertwined with learning.
  5. Socio-culturalist – learning is through discourse and relationships. (teacher as facilitator)
  6. The Complexity Perspective – the learner within the environment, adaptability, cross-cultural skills, collaboration & problem solving. (‘21st century skills’)

Oh good, I thought, I’m not the only one who has taken a while to arrive at an understanding of humans as complex beings. Now that we can see this clearly, Alex asks us to put the test-taker at the centre of the whole process and consider who they might be. He reminds us that we each have many identities: as part of a family, an institution, a community and a national culture to name a few. But when our students walk into a test room, they are often reduced to the identity of ‘test-taker’. Crucially, this not only affects their experience of the exam, it also has an enormous impact on the exam preparation process.

Alex talks a lot about ‘washback’; the effect of the test preparation on the experience of learning. If the students are having to practise tasks divorced from their interests and experiences, developing tricks just to meet the requirement of that exam then it might get them through, but is it really a productive use of their time? Furthermore, their motivation can drop and their language development can become stunted. We’re battling against the wind if, as teachers, we’re scratching around for ways to connect the test to the real world, trying to convince our students that it’s worth adopting personalities they don’t have in order to pass a test and trying to keep them motivated in the face of this… How exhausting! How much easier it is if the test is centred around real-world communication and the interests of the candidate. How much more motivating both short and long term.

Finally, Alex showed us how our students can be more motivated and successful with the right test. He talks about helping them to shift their beliefs to open them up to success through considering:

  • Self-efficacy – our evaluation of our own ability to successfully do something specific
  • Self-concept – how we perceive ourselves in a global sense
  • Self-esteem – out holistic emotional evaluation
  • Identity – our view of ourselves in relation to a specific concept/group

Alex reminds us that these identities are not set in stone. Negative emotions inhibit while positive emotions enhance. A well-designed test can have many positive washback effects on the ‘test-taker’.

Nowadays my teaching preparation consists largely of thinking about my students as I walk through the park to school. I ask myself what they enjoy, what they need, how I can set up activities which draw on their experiences and ideas, and how I can use these to help them to maximise their potential. Most of my prep is done in the park rather than at the photocopier. How liberating!