How an Educator can Assess Learners in a Multi-level Classroom?

Are you a tutor? Then you must be aware of the problems that teachers face while imparting education to students in a classroom. There are many such problems. One of them is difficulty in assessing the learners.If you keep yourself updated as a teacher, you must be aware of the ongoing experiments in education.It’s true that they are mostly taking place in the developed countries. But developing countries like India, Malaysia, and others are also catching up.Multi-level classroom is a new concept. It articulates the experimental aspects of today's education.

What is a Multi-level Classroom?

A multi-level classroom is as diverse as the students in it.This statement alone can help you get familiar with the idea. Examples can define it in a better way. Students in a multi-level classroom come from various backgrounds.

So, it’s variety that rules and defines a multi-level classroom.Diversity across several areas pertaining to education is a trademark characteristic of such a classroom. You may come across students, who only speak English and students, who only speak German. More so, some students who speak English may be fluent in it while others may lack proficiency. And as a teacher, it is your duty to cater to all the students – those who are with various proficiency in various subjects.

Benefits of a Multi-level Classroom

Multi-level classroom is surely one of the ruling trends these days. And that’s not without any reason.Such classrooms offer multiple benefits. Here’s a quick look at some of them.

Besides, each student in a multi-level classroom can learn at his own pace and peer pressure is nearly absent. Even if it develops over time, this is likely to have a negligible impact on students.

Besides, students will understand the significance of learning in heterogeneous groups. Studies have shown that learning in a variegated group is always better than in a homogeneous one. The latter may create an initial comfort, but it disappears as the learning atmosphere changes, making it difficult for the student to learn.

The Challenges

The benefits are there, but so are the challenges that embrace the process of teaching in a multi-level classroom. Here are some of them.

 

 

• Finding appropriate resources:

  Because the classroom is varied, the one-size-fits-all formula won’t work. A unique teaching resource can never be helpful for all students, and so the educator needs to find different resources. But that’s difficult and time-consuming.

• Convenient grouping:

  The educator will have a hard time creating groups. If it’s done on the basis language, two groups will find it difficult to communicate with each other. And if ethnic background is considered, an animosity might grow between them.

• Individualized care:

  The overwhelming diversity in a multi-level classroom is expected to make it almost impossible for an educator to take individualized care of his students.

The educator can overcome the challenges through flexible curriculum and an increased level of interaction.

The Biggest Challenge

What’s the major challenge that a teacher faces while imparting lessons in a multi-level classroom?It’s surely the issue of correctly assessing a single student among many from multiple levels. An educator’s inability to take personalized care of students may lead to problems, as such he won't be able to cater to their varying needs.

Correct assessment, therefore, is essential. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. Correctly assessing one student may take time, and while assessing him, the educator may have to familiarize himself with ample number of things that exclusively apply to him.Now let’s assume there are 20 students in a class from assorted backgrounds, he’d have to become familiar with each of them. This simply means that the level of difficulty faced by him at the time of assessing one student will increase twenty-fold.

How to Assess?

An educator needs to devise a set of strategies so he could carry out a better assessment of his students.Here’s a quick look at what they can do under such circumstances.

Once we discuss these strategies at length, you will understand how you can assess students in a multi-level classroom without any hassle.

Peer Tutoring

We’ve already mentioned that grouping students in a multi-level classroom is difficult. So, before motivating two students to interact with each other, an educator needs to ensure that there’s some commonality between them. In fact, that's a prerequisite for peer tutoring.The key benefit of peer tutoring is observing and assessing more than one student at a time. This way, an educator can gain insight into what exactly the students require and save himself time. He doesn’t need to select students who have expertise. Since peer tutoring makes way for knowledge sharing, they can have a standard level of competency. The more they’d interact, the easier it will become for the educator to assess them.

Use of Self-access Materials

Students often find self-access materials intimidating. The educator needs to assure them that the materials won't add up to their existing curriculum. Instead, those are rather meant to help them get an idea of themselves.He should make the materials subject-specific and present them in simple formats. A self-review or a practice sheet is more useful than a shelf full of “How to Guide Yourself” type books.

Setting Targets

In a multi-level classroom, target setting can help an educator understand why one student can't reach a certain level of expertise. A particular student from a certain ethnic background may find a target achievable, while it might not seem as easy to another from a different background.Which factor is being obtrusive here? Belonging to a different ethnic background? Or something else?When setting the next target, the educator can pick two students from the same ethnic background. If one still performs better than the other, he can uncheck ethnic difference from the list of the factors obtrusive to learning.Setting targets for students and encouraging them to achieve those targets can help the educator identify the factors that are intrusive to learning and also how each student handles them.

Breaking Targets into Smaller Segments

Mostly the language schools use this strategy. A small target is more easily achievable than a voluminous one. Setting a colossal target can scare students and under duress, they may not perform better, hindering the educator from recognizing their true potential.So, how can this issue be solved?The educator can break the target into several manageable chunks and present it to the students. It will help the students to respond better. This, in turn, will enable the educator to assess them without much hassle.Take the example of a spoken English class. The teacher can give students the following tasks:

• Ask questions and respond to them regarding personal preferences.
• Speak on the same topic for a minute.
• Cite examples for clarifying.

How can They Help Assessing the Students?

The three tasks described above can deliver the educator an insight into how the student can get a grasp of multiple aspects of a unique subject.For example, when he’s asking his fellow students about their preferences and when he’s giving an answer to the same question, he’s looking at the same issue from two different perspectives. And then, when he’s throwing a speech on it, he’s switching to a neutral perspective.In this example, the student's transformation from one role to another centering around the topic is taking only seconds. The student may not understand the importance of such transformation, but the educator should, along with his role in it. He'd gain a remarkable insight into the student's ability to ideate and present the idea in terms of words.Since this process takes less time and can be seamlessly carried out, an educator can apply it in a multi-level classroom.

Understanding a student’s needs

This is the biggest factor in assessing a student. Needless to say, it’s difficult as well. More so in a multi-level classroom. A student with an excellent command over English may need to learn French, while a non-native student may have the desire to achieve the mastery in English that the former student possesses.The educator has two options. He can choose one of them or both.

 

❏ Standardized tests:

Albeit this is helpful, the difficult part is to format the test. The test papers must be made available in several languages as the class has students from varied linguistic backgrounds. By keeping the difficulty level of the questions uniform, the educator can easily identify which students are weak and what type of help they need. There are alternatives to such tests, but those alternatives lack uniformity.

❏ Interpersonal communication:

In a classroom, students engage in several types of discussions. An educator can encourage them to have more interpersonal communication. If the students are not communicating with the educator, they are communicating with each other. So, they’ll speak out more about their problems.Whether it’s a single-level classroom or a multi-level one, the objective of the educator remains the same: meeting the needs of the learners. The only thing that changes is the need itself. In a multi-level classroom, he needs multiple criteria to identify the needs. Differentiation is necessary to develop such a criteria.

What is Differentiation?

And how can it help?A formative assessment and learning outcome can help the educator plan differentiation. First, he needs to collect learning outcomes from each student and then assign different grades to them. The grades will indicate starting point and where a learner stands in the continuum of the expertise.

Each student will have a unique range assigned to him. This way, the educator will be able to chart a plan for differentiation. The next step is to use the factors of differentiation and create an individual education plan (IEP) for every student.The IEP refers to a customized format that categorically identifies each student in terms of their learning outcomes. The interesting thing is, an advanced methodology, such as IEP, is only applicable in complicated setting like a multi-level classroom. A single-grade learning environment is suitable for its application.

Multi-level Learning

Multi-level classroom and multi-level learning; one suits the other. If an educator adopts a failsafe multilevel learning approach, he can dodge a range of difficulties without any hassle.To implement multi-level learning, the educator needs to:

• Design course modules at different levels.
• The lessons designed by the educator should promote a student at his own level of learning. Unless the lessons function as makeshift support tools, students can’t get a push.
• Make sure the lesson engages the learners through activities that enable them to exhibit their potential through multiple pathways.
• Involve students in activities that demonstrate the significance of collaboration. This way, the students will learn they need to set aside all the differences that obstruct learning.

Applying the above strategies can help the educator assess students. Since multi-level learning is a unique approach, any student, who’s not able to stand up to it, is not fit for group learning and group activities. He may require personalized attention.

Personality and age

A class full of children is easy to handle for an educator.But a class full of adult learners?Not so easy.That’s because adults have many socio-cultural differences already imprinted in their minds. And such differences affect learning. But a child's mind is a tabula rasa. You can write anything on it and it will stay there forever (at least for a long time).But even though children aren’t aware of socio-cultural differences between them, the difference in their personality traits and age could be crucial factors. Studies done lately have revealed gender, personality and age define one's capabilities in E-learning. An eight-year-old may not behave cordially with a four-year-old, half his age. He may bully him. The funny thing is, such problems never arise for adult learners. Yet, when you are teaching children, these might turn into big issues.The educator, therefore, needs to create at least two groupings when dealing with children. One grouping based on the age of the children and another on their personality traits.Next, he needs to develop a unique learning module that applies to both groups. This way, the educator will find it incredibly easy to assess students.

Socio-economic Factors

The differences between adult learners can be credited to socio-economic factors, which presumably play a key role in learning. A student from a low-income group may display some behavioral traits that another, who belongs to a higher income group, won’t.Such behavioral traits may impair learning. To make things worse, adult learners may suppress the problems they are facing at the time of learning. This could make it difficult for the teacher to identify those problems. Hence, the teacher needs to increase the level of interaction with them to ensure that they speak out about their problems in learning right in the class.

Goal-oriented Learning

Assessing students become quite easy if the teachers can apprehend their goals. A goal defines an individual. For students, setting goals is vital as a goal affects them in several ways. Keeping that in mind can help an educator quickly understand the student’s learning abilities. Hence by making the course modules goal-oriented, the educator can assess a learner.A multi-level classroom is an upcoming trend in the educational sphere. But teaching in such a classroom isn’t an easy task for any tutor. A flawless preparation is needed for the purpose. The teacher needs to take up the responsibilities. Besides, he should also have proper strategies in place to ensure that despite the disadvantages, his process of teaching ensures that every student receives proper attention.