Task 1: Diagnostic

Assessment Interview
1. What is Diagnostic assessment and how does it help you as a teacher?
Diagnostic is what we do before we teach them, so if I have them and ask them questions I know
how much they know so I know where to start teaching, do they know the basics or not, so it tells
me where to start teaching and how much to include in my introduction, if they don’t know much
about the topic I have to add lots of details, if they know the topic I have to move a little bit
higher level of teaching.

2. What procedures do you follow after the diagnostic assessment?

for the diagnostic assessment I ask a lot of questions because I want to see if they can give me
the answers, like in since if I ask them when we move things what is it called? If they can’t tell
me motion that means they don’t know anything about motion, so the most important thing for
diagnostic is oral questions I don’t use much writing for diagnostic.

3. Which type of diagnostic assessment you think is the most effective?

The most effective way to me is Oral, what is also a nice idea for diagnostic is a checklist, so you
can put a question and give them an option to tick A, B or C, multiple choice, YES and NO
questions. But it is better to do the oral because if I get them to write it I have to check it and it
takes time, but in oral I get an immediate feedback, so for me oral is the best for diagnostic.

4. Have they taken a diagnostic assessment in the beginning of the year?

Yes, they do there were some teachers who did one for grade 2, 3, 4 and 5 in the first week of the
first term, so they looked at that diagnostic assessment, and now we’re doing it again to compare
it to the first one and see the improvements.

5. Who develops this assessment?

we het it directly from the MOE and all the school do exactly the same thing.

6. Who conducted the diagnostic assessment?

All the English teachers, we were giving different classes and we had to go to different students
in our free time to test them.

7. Were the students assessed individually?

Yes, so what we do was if there is table outside or a mat I would call one student at a time,
because they have different abilities.

8. What decisions do you make based on these assessments?

MOE has got different grading based on the students’ level” high, middle, low”, so they result of
these assessment helps us to put them into levels in beginning of the term, and the results now
will help us to put them into classes based on their level next year.

9. What is the purpose of this assessment?

the purpose of this assessment is to spot the weaknesses and to tell you what level to teach on, if
they’re very weak you can’t teach in a high level and if they’re in a high level you don’t want to
teach in a low level, you need to be able to know what level your class is.
10. What are the negatives of oral diagnostic assessment?
The negative about oral testing is you can’t provide a proof, let’s say that I did an oral test on
Sunday, I know I did it and I remember what my student said, but if somebody comes in and
asks me: did you a diagnostic assessment? I said yes then he asks for evidence, you don’t have
an evidence of something that is oral, so you could have it written or record it, because often in
our job we have to give proof.

11. What about the written assessment?

The positive with the written is I have a proof and a feedback and I can always do one in the
beginning of the term and one in the end then compare them, the only problem like I said is with
written is that it’s very time consuming to get the feedback, that will help if I want to group
them later but If I wanted to focus on what to teach, questions to ask, I prefer the oral.