Page 30 - The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 9 to 12: French as a Second Language – Core, Extended, and Immersion, 2014

THE ONTARIO CURRICULUM | French as a Second Language
• provide a basis for consistent and meaningful feedback to students in relation to provincial content and performance standards;
• establish categories and criteria with which to assess and evaluate students’ learning.
Assessment for Learning and as Learning
Assessment is the process of gathering information that accurately reflects how well a student is achieving the curriculum expectations in a course. The primary purpose of assessment is to improve student learning. Assessment for the purpose of improving student learning is seen as both “assessment for learning” and “assessment as learning”. As part of assessment for learning, teachers provide students with descriptive feedback and coaching for improvement. Teachers engage in assessment as learning by helping all students develop their capacity to be independent, autonomous learners who are able to set individual goals, monitor their own progress, determine next steps, and reflect on their thinking and learning.
As essential steps in assessment for learning and as learning, teachers need to:
• plan assessment concurrently and integrate it seamlessly with instruction;
• share learning goals and success criteria with students at the outset of learning to ensure that students and teachers have a common and shared understanding of these goals and criteria as learning progresses;
• gather information about student learning before, during, and at or near the end of a period of instruction, using a variety of assessment strategies and tools;
• use assessment to inform instruction, guide next steps, and help students monitor their progress towards achieving their learning goals;
• analyse and interpret evidence of learning;
• give and receive specific and timely descriptive feedback about student learning;
• help students to develop skills of peer assessment and self-assessment.
Evaluation
Evaluation refers to the process of judging the quality of student learning on the basis
of established performance standards and assigning a value to represent that quality. Evaluation accurately summarizes and communicates to parents, other teachers, employers, institutions of further education, and students themselves what students know and can do with respect to the overall curriculum expectations. Evaluation is based on assessment of learning that provides evidence of student achievement at strategic times throughout the course, often at the end of a period of learning.
All curriculum expectations must be accounted for in instruction and assessment,
but evaluation focuses on students’ achievement of the overall expectations. A student’s achievement of the overall expectations is evaluated on the basis of his or her achievement of related specific expectations. The overall expectations are broad in nature, and the specific expectations define the particular content or scope of the knowledge and skills referred to in the overall expectations. Teachers will use their professional judgement to determine which specific expectations should be used to evaluate achievement of the overall expectations, and which ones will be accounted for in instruction and assessment but not necessarily evaluated.
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