The habit of reading

As reading should be a-must in all countries and cultures, there are certain cultures, as  Latin-American, where reading is taken as a “hobby”, which means that there is a big percentage of the population who read as an obligation more than as a necessity or opportunity to learn.

The act of reading is implicit in many dimensions (academic, personal, job-related), so people need to read as a way to communicate.  However, this communication is developed in basic levels, basic commands and basic instructions, without taken it further. For academic purposes, reading performance needs to be higher. The development of assessing strategies for reading skills has achieved many outcomes: visuals aids, interactional activities, etc; the real problem for teachers is how to encourage students to read.

Although there are people who are curious and more interested into acquire new knowledge and information, there are many others who are not. Students perceive reading as a boring and tiring activity. Actually, teacher’s struggle along the years has not been to design strategies to assess reading, but to encourage students to perform the act of reading itself.  The challenge is still there, perhaps, parents should get involved and embrace a new attitude towards their children’s skills development, and teach them at home to love reading and become this in a habit more than an obligation. 

Test design improvement pro-quality education

Although there is a big range of ways to assess learners, tests are, by far, the most common and necessary when assessing. However, there are some features tests designers need to take into account to develop good tests. 
 

The vast majority of the institutions and schools, at least in Colombia, do not have especialists on test design, the adminisstrators of the education just lean on teachers` backs and give them the task of test-design. These designs are based  on grids and many teachers just design tests, quizzes, etc. without taking into account the different characteristics a good test need to have and mainly, being careless of the students` needs. Following, the principal features for a good test are listed.


Each one of the characteristics are in the same level of importance, but some of them are more complex than the others in different ways. First, Brown (2000) mentions practicallity, which means that any test should not be expensive, it also must be time efficient to take and to score, easy to administer, and easy to evaluate.

Second, a test design needs to consider many  factors that can affect , somehow, the test score and may result in an unreliable test; these factors can be from the student/taker as temporal iiliness, a "bad day", etc, or just basing the scores on subjectivity, bias or a simply human error, as many test evaluators could  have experienced from time to time. Tests administrators must guarantee the appropiate conditions to take a test, not just in terms of resources,  but also in terms of  infraestructure, and enviromental issues. The test itself also could be a limitant for reliability.


The validity  is perhaps the most complex of the characteristics a test has. This validity is the accomplishing of the objective  by having some references of what the test is measuring. According to the test-taker`s needs, the test is designed to cover the abilities he/she needs to reach a higer level to demostrate a better proficiency.

Authenticity, is defined by Bachman and Palmer as "the degree of correspondence of characteristics of a given language test task to the features of a target language task". Test should not only be taken in the formal pattern, but everything is taught/learnt with a practical purpose. In language learning, four abilities are tested just because they are needed to achieve communicative approaches of the language.

Last but not least, washback, which "is the effect of testing on learning and teaching ". Sometimes, testing could be meaningless, because students work for a simple grade to get the other level, and they know that the most effective way to reach that goal is by passing exams. So, students just get ready, and study to take the exam and have a high grade. However, this ephemeral preparation tends to put the learning process into a vague process; it could be said that students learn for the moment to take the exam, but then, they forget about what the studied, so they end up knowing anything.

This testing process should not be taken so lightly, it is  important to know how to design a test, taking into account all the implications this task has. Institutions need to wake up and have the space for teachers to be trained in fields as Test design for the sake of quality education.