Rutgers University Programme - Students' learning needs

Among the TOEFL ITP^® test’s strengths is its objective assessment of students’ receptive skills (reading and listening), which are harder to assess and remediate than their productive skills (writing and speaking) because they involve processes that occur inside students’minds.

“We, as teachers, have more struggles with teaching reading and listening. When I’m teaching speaking and writing, I can very easily say your grammar is not good or your structure is not good. We can fix that,” she said. “Whereas with reading and listening, if something’s going on in the brain — the connection is not being made — it’s challenging. The data from the TOEFL ITP tests help us to narrow the range of what we need to be looking at.”

Consequently, when she sees a student in class who appears to perform well but whose TOEFL ITP scores are at odds with that performance, she can be confident about the accuracy of the scores. “I take a step back and think, there must be a reason why he or she is getting this score,” she said. Then Hu takes the quandary to her colleagues. “Can we look at this?” she asks them. “How can we use this information to pinpoint what they need to work on?”

Together, the teachers “take a look at everything and try to figure out what’s missing,” Hu said. “Sometimes it’s something as simple as time management, but it’s usually not.” They also discuss the disparity with the student. “It helps us start a dialogue,” Hu continued. “We have them think about [their classroom performance]: In class, you’re fine. Why isn’t it working when you’re taking the test?”

In one case, Hu recalled, the discussion process led PALS teachers to a surprising discovery: a student whose receptive skills tested lower than his productive skills was held back by small words — the prepositions and conjunctions that help us make sense of seemingly unconnected ideas. “We were able to pinpoint that and [The] TOEFL^® [data] has impacted how I deliver a class to the students. Having the TOEFL ITP^® score information allows me to reassess my teaching methods …" Fiona Hu, instructor, American Language Studies, Rutgers University “provide more examples to help him understand those areas.”

“TOEFL ITP scores help us start the conversation, which leads us toward analysing and trying to decipher what we need to do for each student,” Hu said. “It’s especially useful for that.” Here’s a closer look at how teachers use the TOEFL ITP test and other performance data to drive English-language instruction in this pre-college programme.

TOEFL ITP performance data gathered throughout the programme provide additional opportunities to reflect on instruction

According to Hu, many students retake the TOEFL ITP test throughout the programme. For example, “Some students are interested, halfway through the programme, in seeing what their improvement is and take the TOEFL ITP test again,” she said. A second administration is also used “to help us determine whether or not students are ready for the intensive work in our TOEFL iBT^® preparation course.”

PALS uses a minimum TOEFL ITP score of 480 for admission to that course. “Sometimes, if it is a student that can work hard, we’ll accept something that’s a little bit lower,” she noted, “but we’ve found that students who enter our TOEFL iBT class with the minimum of 480 are better suited to handle the heavy academic workload that’s given in the course.” Still other students retake the TOEFL ITP test to gain conditional admission into the Rutgers undergraduate programmes.

These later TOEFL ITP administrations provide staff with additional data to reflect on as they analyse instruction, student learning and the PALS curriculum. Teachers even use TOEFL ITP data to support learning in the TOEFL iBT prep course. In addition to helping them diagnose individual needs, “it helps us to look at how we can better prepare our students in the future,” she said.