Currently, the most widely used school assessment method is the dreaded tests, we are talking about tests in which the student must answer a series of questions about the subject to be evaluated, but are these tests the best way to evaluate students’ knowledge?are there other alternatives?
Before discussing the validity of the exams and the alternatives, it is important to know what the school evaluation is and what its purpose is, if someone asks what the evaluation of a student is, they will probably respond indirectly saying that it is used to verify that the person evaluated has the necessary knowledge.
- Thus.
- In the event that the student has the necessary knowledge.
- It would be approved and otherwise would redirect the course.
- But in reality the latter law is far from being fulfilled and.
- Therefore.
- Also the objective of the tests that normally occur in our educational system.
A good assessment, in the educational context, focuses on identifying the student’s current knowledge and skills to know what level of learning he or she is at and what is the purpose of that?A very simple goal that teachers often forget: to evaluate whether the proposed teaching system works for this student.
The note, besides being one? Quantifying the student’s knowledge at the scale proposed by the teacher, should give us an idea of whether the strategy we use to get the student to assimilate the knowledge we are trying to transmit works.
In this sense, if done correctly, evaluation would be a powerful tool in the student learning process, however, seeing the assessment as a simple method of selecting or ranking students is a very precarious and reduced vision.
If we seek student development as the goal of education, we cannot fail to use the assessment inappropriately.
Understanding evaluation as a tool to guide students and adjust the way we teach them, we will see that traditional exams pose many problems to help us in both tasks, here are some of their shortcomings:
Given the problems that traditional school assessment may pose, it will be necessary to look for alternatives, we could say that these are three pillars on which the assessment must be based in order to be correct: (a) competency assessment, (b) portfolio systems and (c) the use of ICTs?Sa
The goal of a course is for the student to learn a series of knowledge, but also and above all, that he learns a series of skills, for example, the purpose of mathematics is for the student to become familiar and memorize certain formulas and processes. , but the most important thing is that you understand them and know how to apply them to solve problems.
The evaluation should identify students’ strengths and weaknesses, knowing this we can guide learning to strengthen your skills and stimulate the development of those you don’t already have, so that this works it is essential to plan well the skills We need to develop in a certain discipline and a teaching system as flexible and individualized as possible.
Competency assessment tells us what to evaluate, but we also need to know how. Portfolio systems provide us with an individualized evaluation method focused on student development. But what is a portfolio system?
Psychologist Kingore defines them as 😕 The portfolio is a systematic collection representative of the student’s work, which is selected between the teacher and the student to provide information on the child’s development, learning profile, interests, level of achievement and learning development over time.
That is, portfolios are “files” where the student places all the work related to the subject he is studying and is constantly reviewed by the teacher to evaluate its evolution, allowing the teacher to know the level of learning of each student and prepare the appropriate instructions for their development. Of course, it would also be helpful to evaluate whether the student has developed the necessary skills.
The problem with these portfolios is the complexity of their management because of the amount of information they contain. One possible solution to this difficulty would be ICT?S.
Computers, the Internet and other communication systems (ICTs) provide us with many resources that can benefit the evaluation, ICTs can help us solve the difficult management of portfolios, in this sense, the existence of an online program that manages all the information that students and teachers provide for the various electronic folders would greatly facilitate the evaluation.
In conclusion, we leave a question of reflection: knowing the shortcomings of traditional tests and the alternatives that exist, why are the tests still the standard evaluation system?