Informal Assessment

Informal assessment is a system of observation and collection of data about our students’ performance in normal classroom conditions. In our daily job as teachers, we can intuitively assess students’ performance when speaking, writing, reading or listening just by paying attention to their attitudes and their participation in class activities, but if we want to carry out an effective informal assessment we need to carefully carry out systematic observation. To do this, firstly we need to decide what we are going to assess (either linguistic or non linguistic factors), then we must establish clear criteria for assessing students and not only rely on rough impressions, and finally we have to link the informal assessment we do with formal assessment in order to give our students as much of objective information as we can, so they can use this information as a reliable feedback that helps them to think for themselves about their performance.