Abstract:

In recent years, CBE (Competence-Based Education) has been introduced at all levels of education in Russia, which has brought to the forefront the necessity to change approaches to assessment. Now that the new requirements are put forward, teachers need to modify their classroom assessment practices. However, courses on assessment have not traditionally been on the curriculum in teacher-training institutions in Russia, and teachers more often than not habitually focus on assessing knowledge rather than competence-based learning outcomes, often displaying unconscious incompetence in the area of assessment. With a view to bridge this gap, a bespoke professional development course aimed at improving the assessment competence of English-language tertiary teachers has been designed and piloted in Russia.

The main hypothesis is that a major improvement in planning and assessing students’ learning outcomes can be achieved if the teachers are provided with an opportunity to immerse in practical activities to expose them to modern assessment practices, such as assessment for learning and assessment as learning, with the aim to foster teachers’ student-centered attitudes in assessment thus providing conditions for implementing a shift in the set of educational values. The professional development course aims at creating favourable conditions for teachers to interiorize new student-centered values in assessment and providing them with an opportunity to engage in project work to practice modern approaches to and methods of assessment, which includes formulating intended learning outcomes with Bloom’s active verbs, designing tasks aimed at building specific students’ competences, developing and employing criterion-based scoring scales for assessment as well as giving and receiving feedback to and from students.

The analysis of the results displayed by the course participants proved that project work as well as continuous pedagogical reflection ensures building conscious competence in assessment among approximately two-thirds of the course participants, thus substantiating the correctness of the approach in professional development aimed at creating conditions intended to instill new educational values, which leads to employing proper assessment tools in teaching practices. Further research will concentrate on how successful the building of conscious competence in assessment is in terms of whether the participants join the professional development course out of their own accord, thus demonstrating conscious incompetence, or they have been sent to the course by the university management.

Keywords:

Teaching English as a foreign language, teachers' professional development, educational values, competence assessment.