Indeterminacy, disruption, and (more) intelligent approaches to classroom language assessment: Learning from the COVID-19 pandemic

As the COVID-19 pandemic brought nearly all public activities to a halt in 2020, the disruptions to education were as significant as in any domain (Ali et al., 2020).The months that followed -and in some cases much longer was required before there was a return to any kind of normalcy -challenged teachers to identify, adapt, and create practices that could enable them to continue to make progress toward learning goals and, equally important, to maintain contact with students during a period of uncertainty and emotional distress (e.g., Cooper et al., 2021;Maaoui et al., 2023).While pressures also mounted on language testing professionals to determine how high-stakes assessments might continue (see Clark et al., 2021;Muhammad & Ockey, 2021), the adage that necessity is the mother of invention may be especially apt for characterizing the demands placed upon teachers during this time.Although many teachers certainly had relevant experiences and language assessment literacies to draw upon, for others the pandemic presented difficulties unlike anything they had previously encountered, such as an overnight shift to fully online learning, planning lessons for asynchronous delivery, and navigating so-called hybrid environments simultaneously involving both in-person and remote students.Moreover, technological affordances introduced to help teachers meet these challenges, such as Zoom and other videoconferencing platforms, were often previously unknown to teachers, required rapid learning of their functionality, and posed