A Case study of an assessment task bank

An Assessment Task Bank (ATB) is an attractive option for a language-teaching institution with a criterion-referenced curriculum. In theory, with appropriate professional guidance, teachers could create and moderate tasks, which could then be stocked in the bank to be available for subsequent use by a wider pool of teachers in their classroom assessments. In practice, the process is not a simple one, especially if one of the goals is to have multiple tasks of good quality and approximately the same level of difficulty for each competency being measured. This paper outlines the processes involved in stocking an ATB with appropriate assessment tasks. It reports on the online ATB of the Australian Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP), highlights the major challenges that the task bank faces, presents some of the solutions that have been adopted, and addresses the complex issue of why the process for completing new tasks is inherently slow.