The second area evaluates students' speaking skills. The third area is reading skills assessment. This can be done on a very large scale and both objectivity and reliability of testing can be insured easily. All students in third grade with four years of French language can take a basic reading test and mark their responses on an answer sheet which can be scanned by machine. The fourth area is the assessment of students' writing skills, achieved in various ways.
Students can write essays based on prompts for persuasive or descriptive development, as examples.
These can be ranked and scored with fairly consistent results and with good reliability among raters. These can also be done on a large scale, with students of various groupings and various classroom experiences taking the same test and their writing samples then being weighed against one another. The actual score doesn't stand for anything outside of the testing situation probably - any more than a verb is worth 2 points or good examples are worth 3 points, etc. It will be interesting to look at the scores distribution of these two different groups - and to look at similarities when scored as one group also. The fifth assessment area involves the interdisciplinary and thematic content which results from a co-mingling of Latin and math, Spanish and science, etc.