Chapter 1: Innovations in Assessment: Portfolio Assessment in the Novice Language Classroom

•How do students respond to using portfolios as an assessment measure?

It was a Monday morning mid-semester in a first semester, universitylevel Spanish class. The students were busy working on a group interview activity that required small groups to develop interview questions to pose to another group about their likes and dislikes. One group is struggling to remember appropriate vocabulary words and to form questions using the verb gustar. The teacher approaches the group and reminds them how to formulate questions with this verb. She is confused because the interview activity was designed as a review. The students were just tested on this grammatical construct and performed fairly well on her contextualized, open-ended question exam. Why now could they not remember how to use the same construction in a different context?