Evaluation of the effect of an in-service training program on assessment for learning for English language teachers

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present the effect of an In-Service Training (INSET) Program designed to develop Assessment for Learning (AfL) practices on English language teachers. For this purpose, English language teachers working in the state high schools attended the five-session-long INSET program in 2020-2021 Spring semester. Whether there were any changes between teachers’ responses to the tasks assigned before and after the sessions and what their opinions were related to the training were examined. Data collection tools included a task prepared for each session and a questionnaire including four-point Likert type questions and open-ended items. Descriptive statistics were used in the analysis of the quantitative data while deductive coding was employed to analyze the qualitative data. The results demonstrated that most of the teachers thought that AfL was ‘quite important’. The findings also yielded that the first three items about what changes were detected most were identified as ‘providing more opportunities to express their opinions’, ‘clarifying learning intentions in a detailed way’, and ‘using clear comments’. The outcomes shed light on the participant teachers’ ideas about the differentiations between their first and second responses to the same tasks, and most teachers reported variations between pre- and post-task responses as ‘partially changed’ or ‘changed a lot’. The techniques mentioned during the training were rated as ‘practical’ or ‘partial practical’ by a great number of teachers. The findings suggested that English language teachers should be given more chances for taking part in in-service training programs, especially on AfL; in this way, it can be provided that they can use the new strategies in English language classes efficiently.