The CEFR as an Effective Tool for Evaluation Used by Secondary School Pupils.

Abstract

The goal of this research was to establish whether pupils in secondary schools are able to use the Common European Framework for Reference (CEFR) effectively as a tool for evaluation. Which means that they can use the CEFR to assign the right level of proficiency to, in this case, a text. This thesis looked at secondary school pupils in year one, three and five of their pre-university education in the Netherlands. Their use of the CEFR as a tool for evaluation has been explored through an experiment in which the pupils were asked to assign a CEFR level to two texts in the categories vocabulary, punctuation, and coherence. Results showed that many pupils were not able to assign the right level, but that their scores were increasing as the pupils grew older. Another observation was that vocabulary was the most difficult category to evaluate and that standard deviations become smaller as the pupils get older, meaning a smaller spread of answers across all answer options. In other words, the answers seem to centre more on one point as the pupils get older. Keywords: CEFR, descriptors, education, English, evaluation, levels.