ALADIN Pretests and Posttests: Books 1 and 2

    The academic language tests are designed to simulate the kinds of language tasks students are expected to be able to do in a college classroom. They also include some diagnostic tasks.  The ALADIN academic language pretests and posttests include the following language tasks:

1. Lecture note-taking from a videotaped college lecture.  The notes are scored based on completeness using a scoring rubric.

2. Use of lecture notes for short-answer questions. The answer, in paragraph form, is scored for writing quality and content completeness.

3. Dictation of sentences from lecture.  Responses are scored for vocabulary knowledge level and for correct production of word endings and suffixes.

4. Academic Vocabulary self-assessment.  Students read a list of academic vocabulary and rate their level of knowledge on a five-point scale from 'never seen it before' to 'I know and use this word.'

5. Modified cloze test.  Students read a simplified passage related to the lecture topic and select from four choices the form of the word that fits grammatically in the sentence they are reading.  Assesses knowledge of word endings and sentence structure.

6. Text reading.  Students underline the important information in an excerpt from a college text related to the lecture topic. 

7. Text summarizing.  Students summarize part of the college text they have read and underlined. 

8. Self-assessment:  Students are also asked before and after the test to rate the level of their college language skills.

Score Profile:

    Students receive a score profile of their results on each language task, not a combined numerical total. They can see their relative strengths and weaknesses compared to other students in the norm group. Student progress can be measured by administering both the pretest and the parallel posttest.  You can view a sample score profile by clicking on the words Score Profile above.