Developing Teacher-trainees’ Assessment Awareness in the EFL Classroom through Project-based Learning Activity

Abstract

Due to the Russian State Educational Standard, beginning ESL teachers should possess professional competences, including being ready to implement in their classrooms modern methods and techniques of assessing students’ achievement. However, teacher trainees are not provided with opportunities to acquire assessment skills during their learning process. Developing teacher trainees’ professional competencies during a practicum, that is, a four-week period of school-based practice teaching, may be a way to solve this problem. The key aim of the study is to investigate whether experiencing project-based learning (PBL) activity during a content-based course might raise teacher trainees’ assessment awareness and enable them to put assessment skills to practical use in their future classrooms.
The methodology of the present study includes developing assessment criteria for self- and peer-reflective weekly journals, developing survey questions and descriptive rubrics for grading oral presentations of PBL activity. The results of the research demonstrate that experiencing a PBL activity as a learner can trigger a deeper assessment awareness of project-based learning activities and can help develop confidence in recognizing teacher trainees’ personal strong points essential for their future professional life. By experiencing a PBL activity, teacher-trainees gain insights about its process and observe how students’ self-awareness and confidence in assessment practice are fostered through authentic tasks during a content-based course. This study therefore proposes that project-based learning activity can raise teacher-trainees’ assessment awareness and should be integrated in the teacher-training ESL course at the Astrakhan State University, Russia.