Incorporating Teacher’s Self-evaluation into Formative Assessment: A Study on BRAC DevPro Course

Abstract

The paper is an attempt to explore the features of formative assessment when teacher’s self evaluation is merged with it. Teacher evaluation, usually by students and sometimes by senior colleagues and even by administrators, has been a typical process and a practice to evaluate teacher’s job success, particularly in private universities in Bangladesh. It is generally conducted at the end of the semester by the institute for executing its target. For evaluating students’ success, teachers use formative assessment to check on the progress of their students, to see how far they have mastered what they should have learned, and then use this information to modify their future teaching plan. The researcher carried out this study in an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) Course for Development Professionals (DevPro) conducted by BRAC Institute of Languages (BIL), BRAC University. The target group of the study included sixteen high and mid level professionals of BRAC International which sends its skilled staff to work abroad. As the institutional evaluation of the teacher by students is conducted at the end of the semester and feedback is received in the next semester, the same group of students remains unaffected by the evaluation. Here, the researcher as a teacher got a self-prepared evaluation form filled by the participants in the middle of the course. To reinforce the objectives of formative assessment, the researcher has integrated the findings of self-evaluation into the formative test. This paper, thus, provides the scope for students to get benefited from the teacher and from the course as well. The findings of the paper show very significant changes in the score of formative and summative test. The researcher, here, came up with the outcome that not only formative test but also teacher’s self evaluation can work as a suitable tool to develop the teacher himself, students and the course as well.