I’m looking forward to giving one of the keynote talks at Oxford Day Online, a virtual professional development event, taking place online on Saturday, November 7th.  My talk is called Improving Testing and Assessment in our Programs. And this talk will be given as part of a series of presentation on testing and assessment to be held in the afternoon on China Standard Time. You can learn more about the conference here, including registration information (note the different tabs that give varying amounts of information.) There is also a full program including a complete copy of the schedule and information about the talks and the presenters here.  The morning events are intended for young learners; the afternoon is for secondary and tertiary teachers. There are separate registrations for morning and afternoon. It’s all free, but you do need to register ahead of time.

Abstract of Joe’s talk: Many teachers find the assessment of student progress to be a challenging task and the COVID-19 pandemic has only made matters more difficult. In this interactive session we will revisit the fundamentals of language testing, address common errors in test construction, and share ideas and tips for more effective assessment of students. While the session will make use of examples from Q: Skills for Success the basic concepts are transferable to a variety of teaching contexts. Teachers will leave with a set of useful principles and techniques to use in English language classroom assessment.