Evaluating Validity And Reliability Of Student-centered Assessment In Interpreting Classrooms

Student-centered assessment(SCA)including student self-assessment and peer assessment has the potential to improve students’ academic performance,increase learning autonomy,and enhance learning motivation.High-quality SCA can not only help learners improve learning process and promote learning outcomes,but also help reduce teachers’ workload associated with assessment practices while bolster a better understanding of the dynamics in a leaner-centered learning context.In the field of interpreting education,so far,few studies have been conducted to investigate the consistency,accuracy and utility of SCA.Carrying out research on the quality of interpreting students’ SCA is of great significance to both the pedagogical practice and the theoretical study of interpreting.This research mainly adopts the educational experiment method by collecting 16 interpreting learners’ self-and peer assessments twice in one semester,and conducting quantitative analysis of major assessment quality indicators including concurrent validity,intra-rater reliability,and inter-rater reliability to determine the overall quality and characteristics of SCA by interpreting learners under the current research context.The research generates findings including:1)The concurrent validity of self-assessment is low to moderate which means that self-assessment provides information of their attainment which only marginally conforms with the assessment results provided by their teacher as students generally tend to underestimate their performance.2)The concurrent validity of peer assessment by interpreting students is relatively high.3)The intra-rater reliability of self-assessment by interpreting students is moderate.4)The inter-rater reliability of peer assessment by interpreting students is relatively low but the intra-rater reliability remains relatively high.The findings suggest that in the learning environment involved in this research,the quality of peer-assessment of interpreting learners is higher than that of their self-assessment,indicating that peer-assessment can be carried out as a valuable and viable technique for interpreting classroom assessment.This research uses empirical methods to explore the validity and reliability of student-centered assessment in interpreting training,and provides evidence-based support for studying the quality and effects of SC A by interpreting learners.The results of this research are expected to shed light on research endeavors and pedagogical practices of interpreting classroom assessment and better tap the potential of SCA to improve overall students’efficiency gains.