EAP assessment: practitioners’ decision-making process – Anna Murawska

EAP assessment: practitioners’ decision-making process – Anna Murawska – a.murawska@leeds.ac.uk
EAP practitioners are involved in many high-stakes assessment decisions with important implications for both students and receiving institutions. Processes involved in evaluating students’ progress are inherently complex yet many high-stakes decisions have to be taken with limited information about the students, particularly on short courses. The global pandemic further reduced the amount of information practitioners have access to, with fewer contact hours and some students unable to sit standardised admission tests. Consequently, practitioners find themselves having to rely heavily on inner and informal resources – intuition, experience and colleagues’ support. While this resilience is admirable, it is necessary to ensure that the process of assessment decision-making is not overly stressful for practitioners, as well as robust and reliable for the quality assurance purposes.
Benefits of the project:
Tapping into collective experience of EAP practitioners will make the complex process of decision-making more tangible. Such exploration is developmental for novice as well as experienced practitioners. I hope the project will promote important discussions about assessment culture and the role of assessment criteria, standardisation and moderation procedures in developing teachers’ assessment literacy.