63 Oral responses, including recorded responses
Definition
Providing students with the opportunity to respond verbally, live or recorded, in place of written or another format, to demonstrate knowledge and understanding
In action
Arrange a space where students will be able to respond to prompts orally during an assessment, or prepare technology, space, and resources to allow students to record their responses in advance.
Support Strategies
- Identify non-verbal items or activities that could create barriers in accurately assessing student knowledge or understanding
- Replace identified non-verbal activities with equivalent opportunities for verbal response
- Provide students with tools that allow them to submit assignments with recorded responses, such as iMovie, google documents, or D2L recorded submissions
- Design assessments inclusive of oral responses, such as public speaking tasks
- Provide students with speech-to-text software so written responses can be enhanced
- Provide training and support for students using oral response
- Link oral and written responses, as appropriate, through use of automatic transcription tools.
Case Study
Student: Grade 9 student in a French class
Content: Students are analyzing their favourite French songs for a summative assessment focused on key vocabulary.
Problem: The student is struggling to write their thoughts in French.
Solution: The teacher provides all students with the option to orally record their analysis of the song instead of having them write out their responses. Oral response can later be transcribed and edited by the students.
Additional Resources
- Detailed chart outlining different types of response accommodations from the IRIS Center
- Information on different ways to solicit student responses from the Inclusive Schools Network
- Tool to support individual conferences with students from Edutopia
- Testing accommodation list from the IRIS CENTER
- Description on alternate evaluation methods, including oral response from the Friendship circle
