EALTA Summer School Diaries: Day 1 on PhotoPeach

EALTA’s Testing and Assessment summer school kicked off yesterday with 24 participants coming from various nationalities. Most of the participants got wet under the pouring rain but none of us minded this because the coordinator of the event Gudrun (Ericson) and Marianne (Demarret) and the course tutors Professors Norman Verhelst, John de Jong and Jan-Eric Gustafsson gave us a warm welcome.

After a short introduction and orientation to the course we were introduced to Classical Measurement Theory and we sought answers to essential questions for fair practice in testing including:

• “Why should one measure?”
• “What are the differences between modern theories of measurement- Item response theory (IRT) and classical theory?
• “How to interpret correlation between items of a test?”
• “How to maintain reliability of a test?
• “How to measure reliability of a test?”
• “What are the reasons for reliability loss?”
• “What are the factors which may lead to sources of variance in test scores?”
• “What’s the relationship between text length and reliability?

Professor Gustafsson explained/defined/illustrated the answers by exemplifying the constructs, instruments, research design and efforts made to maintain reliability and validity of a large-scale  research study; IEA Reading literacy Study that was conducted in 1991 with 4500 Swedish students. Thanks to real life examples, statistical tables and figures it was easier to grasp the answers provided in response to the questions listed above.

In addition to the rich content of the course, background and profile of the participants also contributed to the summer school. Some of the colleagues are working for ministry of education of their countries, some of them are involved in EU projects that aim at portraying language competencies across Europe, some of them are conducting research into testing and assessment and all of them are eager to talk about their experiences.

In short, I feel lucky and amazed maybe  due to  EALTA network in terms of collegial support and professional development or maybe because of the gorgeous “Welcome Reception” that we were treated with at the end of a trying but fruitful day.