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Cognitive CAT in Foreign Language Assessment

Though revolutionizing, Computer Based Assessment (CBA) has not accomplished to become an established system of evaluation in Foreign Language Assessment (FLA). Research in CBA is very narrow and short-term, while the findings are usually misleading. This is mainly due to the inability from the part of New Technologies to simulate the human examiner and the lack of flexibility as regards language errors. In many cases, the performance of examinees during CBA varies from the corresponding performance during a traditional, paper-and-pencil examination. The reason for this has to do either with student or system inability. CBA systems are programmed to assess the competence of a wide number of individual students. Yet, our experience as teachers reveals that the examiner is not an impersonal “checker” but an active, emotional intervener between the examinee and the test. The paper aims to prove that Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT) can deservedly substitute the human examinee, by assessing the true cognitive state and foreign language competence of each student. CAT technologies can introduce a new, student-based era in Foreign Language Assessment that will be personalized, flexible, and sensitive to human cognition, language processing and error correction. To this end, research in FLA needs to fully exploit the current findings in CAT, Cognitive Science, Foreign Language Learning, and Error Correction. After reporting the findings in error correction, the paper separates wrong answers into errors and mistakes and proposes an innovative methodology for CAT as regards FLA that will approximate the exact language competence of each student