Many very intelligent people have said that it is important to administer a variety of assessment types for each skill set. This will give you a deeper, more meaningful understanding of your students’ proficiency in that skill area. For some speaking assessment ideas, please see this post!
Regardless of which speaking assessment you choose to administer, I have a trick (that I adapted from Laura Terrill!) for grading them with ease. I plopped a bunch of mini-speaking rubrics on a sheet of paper, printed them out, cut them apart, labeled them with students’ names, and sorted them by class. Click here to download the rubrics that I use!
Anytime students are completing a speaking task that I want to count as an assessment, I look at the top card on the stack, find that student, and go eavesdrop (or have them come to me). I mark their performance on the card, move the card to the bottom of the stack, and then find the next student, the one whose card is now at the top of the stack.
Typically, I will only get through 3-6 students per class period–and that’s okay! I pick up where I left off the next time that students are engaged in a speaking task. My goal is to cycle through the stack three times per grading period, so that students have three speaking grades to go in the gradebook. Each time I go through the entire stack once, I enter all the grades from that round in the gradebook (on the same day).
I was going to start a list, and then remembered I had one somewhere…on my own blog!
Here’s the link: http://mjtprs.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/speaking-assessments/
I think the key is figuring out what we’re assessing in each of these and how to communicate strengths and help kids build with each one. Lately, in our group assessments, I have only told kids that they have to have one sentence per year of study (for group stories). Now I’m going to add to that, but I think that I might want to say that they need at least two verbs in what they tell me per year of study, or something like that, depending on what we’re working on.