Programs currently use a variety of different written and oral assessment tools, according to the differing needs and capabilities of each program. Programs use admission tests, monthly unit tests, oral assessments, and Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPIs), a formal assessment tool designed by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL).

Assessments are distinguished by OK as assessing either active or passive vocabulary. Written tests typically assess active vocabulary, testing students’ comprehension of explicitly taught course material, i.e. the vocabulary which is actively taught by the program. Oral assessments typically assess passive vocabulary, eliciting use of vocabulary which was not directly taught as course content.

OK requires prospective students to pass an admission test to be accepted into the program. The admission test is a written test requiring students to demonstrate they have memorized a set of pronominal prefixes. The purpose of these tests is to provide preliminary assessment of students’ willingness to self-teach and study the language, as well as to demonstrate to students the technical difficulty of learning Mohawk. This allows for some filtering of students who are not likely to succeed in the program. Similar admission tests are used by Twatati and NTLP, as their curricula are based on OK’s.

OK also uses oral unit tests, administered approximately every 3-4 weeks. These tests require that students translate Mohawk sentences to English and English sentences to Mohawk, based on the material taught in the current course unit. Students are marked based on both the speed and accuracy of their translation. The inclusion of Mohawk-English and English-Mohawk translation allows the assessment to distinguish between comprehensive skills and generative skills, allowing for recognition of when students are not speaking often enough, even when they understand all the Mohawk that is spoken to them.

Twatati uses similar unit tests, administered twice per unit, with each unit lasting between 4 and 5 weeks. Twatati also uses written tests with a multiple choice version of the translation task, requiring students to select the correct translation from a list of translations. Twatati administers oral dialogue assessments approximately every 3-4 weeks, consisting of structured dialogue between students and instructors based on prompts related to current course material and student proficiency.

NTLP members state that formal assessment is de-emphasized in their program, and that instructors primarily monitor student progress through their performance in group translation exercises. This live monitoring is augmented by monthly oral assessments.
OK uses OPIs as a primary tool for diagnostic and summative assessment, to assess student language proficiency at the start of a program year, and at the end of it. OK began using OPIs to satisfy a need for advanced oral proficiency assessment tools, after OK instructors received training in OPI administration from ACTFL trainers. As ACTFL has not created specific certification guidelines for Haudenosaunee languages, OPI training is all that OK required.

ACTFL’s guidelines describe 11 categories of language proficiency, each pertaining to different capabilities of a speaker. In the administration of OK’s OPIs, the tester will gradually elicit more complex language from a student, in order to assess both the lower and upper bounds of a student’s capabilities. A wide range of both active and passive vocabulary is elicited, aided by the use of roleplay to further challenge the student and expose them to less familiar speech contexts. When possible, it is better to have OPIs administered by someone other than a student’s regular instructor, as this reduces personal bias and reduces the possibility of the tester feeding the student familiar vocabulary or scenarios.

Student assessments may serve a variety of primary functions. They may serve as direct teaching tools, which students learn from, as guiding devices, from which students learn what they still need to learn, or most traditionally as tools for assessing student success, from which instructors learn how well students have learned course material. It is important to keep these functions and the goals of the program overall in mind when creating assessments, as to ensure that assessments are effective uses of students’ and instructors’ time and labour. Discussion has identified a few ideas relevant to ensuring that student assessments satisfy their functions. These include explicit learning goals, assessment difficulty, and post-assessment feedback.

Learning goals are the goals which education programs intend students to meet after education. Learning goals are set both at the level of program, describing goals to be met over the course of a year or years, and at the level of class sessions, describing goals to be met after a lesson or a course unit. Learning goals refer to students’ capabilities or understandings, such as their ability to manipulate some grammatical structure, discuss some conversational topic, or fulfill some function with language. When student assessments are designed based on learning goals, and learning goals are explicitly known by students, as by being made clear in written curriculum or verbally told to students, then students are able to better prepare for assessments and better understand how assessments impact their learning. Learning goals are implemented to various degrees between the programs, but it is rare for students to be explicitly told learning goals, often due to undefinedness of the program’s learning goals, or concern for student overwhelm.

Assessments may be made too easy or too hard, resulting in non-functionality. Assessments which are too easy may fail to assess student proficiency or falsely assure students that they are performing well. Assessments which are too hard may discourage students without meaningfully distinguishing between high and low performing students. To ensure assessments are not too easy, it is important to ensure that they require more than rote memorization of example forms used in class; they should test for generative linguistic ability and functional understanding of grammatical concepts. Assessments should cover a large range of relevant grammatical forms, rather than using only common and familiar forms from a paradigm, such as the singular 1st and 2nd person forms of verbs.

Feedback given to students after assessments can help them to understand what they must work on or what they should take away from their assessment results. Feedback which is more specific and helpful may be more effortful for instructors to generate than basic feedback such as rates of correct answers or a simple letter grade, but the generation of such feedback can be made easier by the use of assessments which target specific skills. For example, as discussed earlier, OK’s translation tests assess student’s ability to generate novel Mohawk sentences through English-Mohawk translation, allowing for instructors to specifically witness students’ generative proficiency and provide appropriate feedback. Provision of student feedback in one-on-one contexts may help to mitigate negative reactions.

A few different program goals relevant to assessments have also been discussed by the partner programs. First, it is important that students leave the program able to communicate and converse in the language. Second, it is important that the programs have stability and longevity in the case of loss or change of staff. Third, the programs must be efficient and effective, creating the best speakers possible in the shortest amount of time, with minimal reliance on continuous significant funding. And finally, it is important to convince people that the programs are effective in teaching the language and creating speakers. Student assessments may be designed to help fulfill any and all of these goals.
Program goals of increasing students’ communicative or conversational proficiency may not be directly served by all types of assessment. While it is not necessary for all assessments to directly help with this goal, it may be helpful to consider how any given assessment could do so. Assessments which require students to produce novel responses or directly practice communication may best help these program goals. Thus, improvisational or dialogic student assessments may help to develop communicative skills better than translation exercises, where students do not need to exercise generative language skills to the same degree, even when they are both administered orally.

Program stability and longevity can be improved through the use of effective assessment tools and procedures maintained as part of the program’s curriculum. In early stages, some programs have relied on instructors to create and administer their own assessments, which were not kept as materials by the program. If a program is reliant on this style of assessment, it risks harm or failure if their instructors leave the program without first creating the materials necessary for new instructors to administer their assessments. Thus, programs should seek to use an explicitly determined set of assessments tools and procedures as part of their curriculum, ensuring that the same assessment tools may be used, updated as necessary, and taught to new instructors.

Programs’ need for efficient and effective teaching can be helped by the use of well-designed and low-cost assessment tools. Tools which do not teach students or effectively assess student proficiency should be recognized as hindering program efficiency and poorly spending student and instructor time and labour, and so be replaced or modified. The most efficient assessments may be those which have explicit pedagogical function, which require little marking time after their administration, which are quick and easy to administer, and which require a minimum of specific instructor training. These factors may not always be compatible, and may even be exclusive, but they should all be kept in mind when evaluating the practical value of assessment tools.

Data from assessment tools is able to help convince people & organizations that the programs are effective, and may help in securing formal partnerships, acquiring institutional recognition, and accessing funding. This effect will be augmented if assessments tools are easily recognized as effective tests of student proficiency and students perform well on them. OPIs are notable in this respect, as they are the recognized formal assessment tools of ACTFL, a large and well-recognized language teaching organization, and so are likely to earn programs significant respect, especially in the eyes of settler institutions and large language organizations. Sharing and standardization of assessment tools between programs, when possible, allowing for differences between languages, may also help to make the results of assessment tools more convincing.

A few current issues with assessment tools used by the programs can be identified. Prospective future directions for assessment development can be inferred from these issues. First, some issues with the use of admission tests have arisen for OK and NTLP. NTLP reports that too few of their already low number of prospective students pass the admission test for it to be viable to use to filter program applicants, even after the development and attendance of preparatory night classes. OK has found that with increasing applicant numbers, the admission test does not filter enough students relative to the program’s capacity, requiring the use of additional applicant filtering techniques, such as preferences based on applicants’ age or if they have children. OK has also found that performance on the admission test is insufficiently predictive of future student performance. These findings together indicate it may be useful to schematize a variety of admission tests of different difficulties in order to accommodate different community sizes and degrees of student performance. It may also be useful to investigate what factors accurately predict student success and develop new admission test materials which investigate other aspects of applicants than their ability to self-study and memorize basic language material.

Second, program instructors report that students have difficulty engaging with assessments, primarily due to fear or disaffectedness. Many students are either anxious about their success in assessments or do not care about how well they perform in assessments. Students have tended to be more comfortable and engaged with assessments that concern topics they are personally interested in or that relate to their real lives, such students are more willing to speak in dialogic assessments where they are asked to talk about their families or daily lives. The issue of student fear might arise from associations with settler education and assessment models which position assessment results as representative of student’s human value; it could help to introduce students assessments as a collaboration between students and instructors, meant to help them both to successfully operate the language program. Issues of fear and disaffectedness may also originate outside of the program, such as from students’ emotional or economic issues. In many cases it will not be feasible for instructors to directly address these issues, but with appropriate training it is possible for instructors to safely manage such issues to the extent that it is possible. Student disengagement with assessments may be solved in some specific cases by the use of individual accommodations which account for a student’s goals and limitations. For example, if a student is focused primarily on the development of literary skills, and does not perform well on oral tests, it may be better to test them in written formats rather than orally. Such accommodations may also be made in the instruction a student receives prior to assessment, through including a variety of educational materials and supports appropriate to the needs of all students. If multiple instructors are able to administer oral tests, it may be helpful for students to be able to choose who administers their assessments.

Third, there are some issues with the framework of OPIs and ACTFL certification which challenge their use in Haudenosaunee adult language education. ACTFL does not have specific guidelines for certification of proficiency in Haudenosaunee languages, and the general guidelines ACTFL provides for proficiency certification do not function well with polysynthetic languages such as the Haudenosaunee languages. ACTFL’s guidelines rate speaker proficiency based on descriptions of linguistic features and functions which are not as easily distinguished and assessed in polysynthetic languages as in the languages the guidelines were originally formulated for, rendering it difficult to assign a student a specific proficiency level; their actual performance within any category may occupy a range of proficiencies. Because of this, program partners have discussed the possibility of formulation of a Haudenosaunee equivalent to ACTFL, which may better match the characteristics of polysynthetic languages and better assess the proficiency of speakers. However, this work has not yet been done.