The Use of Modern Important Skills - Essay Example

The methods of evaluating knowledge, understanding, literacy and other important skills are becoming more and more important in our days. The urgency of the subject can be explained by increasing importance of professional skills. Most of the employers believe that the quality of diplomas do not correspond to company's requirements. Because of it many young specialists graduating from the university have difficulties in placement. The second factor explaining the importance of assessment strategies is the appearance of on -line education. My works will evaluate such assessment forms as traditional exams, rubrics, Iq tests open book exams, some methods of evaluating social skills . First it's necessary to determine the assessment. Assessment is the process of observing and measuring learning.1 Assessment provides the professor with the better understanding of what students are learning and ensures that students will learn more of the volume of knowledge necessary for their career while using the added benefits of learning subjects. So the first advantage of the assessment can be defined as providing students with the incentive of learning more carefully. I am absolutely agree with the Taylor's motivation theory that every worker is lazy and should be controlled. The students are also lazy and it's evident that a considerable part of them is motivated by the necessity of passing examinations . In general there are four main functions of assessment: formative assessment, Educative assessment Evaluative assessment, Summative assessment. Formative assessment can be defined as providing the instructor with the information of how the main learning objectives are being met. The value of he formative assessment was pointed by Black and William's 2(1998) paper. They pointed out that the high quality formative assessment has an impact on students learning. In addition, the assessment is useful to dived the students into groups according to their lever of school knowledge. Summative assessment informs about the students achievements upon completition of an activity, module, or course. Evaluative assessment provides the instructor with the necessity of using some special techniques In addition, the last type of assessment must be regarded as a part of working process designed to see the efficiency of learning and teaching both for the students and learners. There are some forms of assessment in higher education each with its own disadvantages and advantages. The traditional exams are demonstrably fair because all the students have the same tasks to complete. Another very important advantage is the captaincy that the work which is being assessed is done by he applicant and not by the other people. The disadvantages are that first badly set examinations cause surface learning that means students consciously clearing their minds of one subject as they prepare for exams in the next subject. . In addition, exams tend to evaluate how good are students in answering questions not in learning. In addition, it must be said that this is the most stressful form of assessment. In some cases, another system quiet similar to the previous one is implemented. It is called open book examinations. The major difference is that students are allowed to take reference information this them Such systems have many advantages of traditional exams in addition they check how good are students in using information sources. The next one is essay writing system such system allows seeing individuality and expression of students. But in some cases there is no guarantee that the work was prepared by the candidate himself not by other people. In addition it's the most subjective system of assessment. Essay-marking exercises at workshops on assessment show marked differences between the mark or grade that different assessors award the same essay - even when equipped with clear sets of assessment criteria. The most ancient method of evaluating is oral examination. The most important disadvantage when using as entrance examination is the danger of non-objective marking. Examiners are often non-limited in a number of questions they can set. Also there is a danger of keeking question that means that students who have already passed the exam might communicate with their friends. This type of examination is very effective than it's necessary to see oral skills of the candidates. For example in one university perspective translators had their entering exams in the form of test as a result near one half of students suffered from different speech defects such as stammering, lisping, burr and so on. In addition, students might argue their notes after the exams saying for example that he intended give right answer but was misunderstood by the examiner. Or the student who got bad mark might say that his or her questions wre more difficult that his friend's ones. So the tests are often being criticized for evaluating only theoretical knowledge not communicational skills or reasoning possibilities. Some recommendations must be observed when using a system of oral exams. First of all it's necessary to prepare the agenda in advance to avoid the necessity of inventing questions at the last minute or making a compilation from the series of interviews with other students. Secondly students at ease must be examined at the beginning. Memory is not sufficient that's why each examiner should have papers to make notes. An appropriate assessment strategy must be implemented as learning experience for students. The first strategy I'd like to tell about is rubrics. Sometimes this kind of assessment might seem to be mysterious for the students. They may be told to take notes in class, read the chapter and answer the questions at the end, but they may get few specifics regarding what material will be assessed, and at what depth. In contrast rubric inform them at the beginning of the course what skills and knowledge they will be able to attain at the and. This kind of assessment was largely illustrated in the literature. For example, In their book Learner-Centered Assessment on College Campuses, Hubba and Freed (2000) point out that Scoring rubrics usually contain the following elements: 3 Clear statements of the level of knowledge you expect the student to achieve for them to receive a given grade. The dimensions of the quality of work you expect the student to achieve. Commentaries describing your expectations of knowledge and quality that distinguishes each grade band (e.g. ABCDF). Diane Elbert May believes that using rubrics will help to avoid misunderstanding between the professor ad the student.4 Has a student ever said to you regarding an assignment, "But, I didn't know what you wanted!" or "Why did her paper get an 'A' and mine a 'C'" Students must understand the goals we expect them to achieve in course assignments, and importantly, the criteria we use to determine how well they have achieved those goals. In addition assessment can be either formal or informal. The difference is that in case of using formal assessment the professor usually offers student a written document such as a test, quiz, or paper Informal assessment is usually implemented in more casual forms such as discussions, observation, inventories, participation, peer, and self-evaluation. Their assessment can be designed to evaluate mental possibilities of the potential learners. The most widespread example of such a test is the IQ. Such types of tests are usually called non-referenced. Many entrance tests (to prestigious schools or universities) are norm-referenced, permitting a fixed proportion of students to pass ("passing" in this context means being accepted into the school or university rather than an explicit level of ability). Regardless of its form the test are usually designed to measure the general intelligence. An ordinary IQ test usually consists of 30 or 60 questions that must be solved within the limited periods. of time. Some tests have a total time limit or limit for a particular number of problems . However, tests measuring higher intelligence are usually non-limited. IQ measurement is based on 100 points score in which 100 points is an average result. The results over 140 are considered to be very high. People with low IQ ratio need to be look after very carefully. Mental retardation could be caused by biological problems such as brain damage. But the most of such damages are genetically explained. There are some ranges of mental disability related to the IQ scores.5 mild mental retardation: IQ 50-55 to 70; children require mild support; formally called "Educable Mentally Retarded". moderate retardation: IQ 35-40 to 50-55; children require moderate supervision and assistance; formally called "Trainable Mentally Retarded". severe mental retardation: IQ 20-25 to 35-40; can be taught basic life skills and simple tasks with supervision. profound mental retardation: IQ below 20-25; usually caused by a neurological condition; require constant care Nowadays a number of alterative methods of assessment is being developed. According to the specialists, such methods will provide the students with the practical implementation of their knowledge. Such methods include writing essays, experiments completed projects and so on. In addition, a very perspective form of assessment might be a role game. Role games teach students how to implement their theoretical knowledge in practice. For example in Moscow State Linguistic University third -year students preparing to be managers were offered a play named the beginning of business organization. All the students were asked to hold an organisation meeting, during the meeting they had to choose the board of directors, distribute shares of stocks, write minutes distribute duties among the staff, complete schedules for each department. So as a result they had the possibility to analyze their theoretical skills and some practical ones such as completing document, choosing an appropriate behavior strategy at the meetings and so on. Performance-based items or event6s: questions, tasks, or activities that require students to perform an action. Although performances can involve demonstrations or presentations, most typically they involve students explaining how they would answer the question or solve a problem by writing a few sentences or paragraphs, drawing and explaining a diagram, or performing an experiment. Such tasks may take from 15 minutes to an hour or more and may involve some work with a group of students who think through the answers and later provide their own individually written answers. Portfolios: collections of student work that show teachers and others who may "score" portfolios the range and quality of student work over a period of time and in various content areas. There are almost as many approaches to compiling and evaluating portfolios as there are proponents of this form of assessment. Portfolios can be used both formally and informally; ideally, portfolios capture the evolution of students' ideas and can be used instructionally and as progress markers for students, teachers, and program evaluators. In order to analyze potential students social skills most psychologies usually apply social IQ rate. This assessment criteria is quite similar to IQ. Most people have Social IQ rate between 90-100 but many of them exceed this limit. People having social IQ below than 85 points may have difficulties in making friends even autistic symptoms. As a conclusion it must be said that the perfect system of assessment hasn't been developed yet. None of the above forms of assessment is without its merits or its limitations. The challenges caused by greater numbers of students and increased assessment workloads provide an opportunity to make a radical review of the ways we assess our students. In particular, we must ensure that our attempts to meet these challenges do not lead to a retreat from those forms of assessment which are less cost-effective, but which help students to get due credit for a sensible range of the knowledge and skills they demonstrate. So the best way is making a mixture of the methods for example viva examinations might be used to evaluate oral abilities of the students or candidates preparing to be teachers, translators, politicians, managers and other speaking specialists, tests are very convenient to evaluate the theoretical knowledge in professions where speech abilities are not very important such as engineers, designers, programmers. Potential writers and journalists might be asked to write an essay to analyze their creativeness. In addition a system of assessment must include analyzing the state of health of the candidate to provide each of them with the secure educational program protecting the health in the future or to exclude the candidates who possibly won't be able to adapt to working load because of the poor health. Moreover, we need to ensure that learning is not simply assessment-driven. It can be argued that presently we have far too much assessment, but that neither the quality nor the diversity of this assessment is right. Students are highly intelligent people; if we confront them with a game where learning is linked to a rigid and monotonous diet of assessment, they will learn according to the rules of that game. References. 1. William Slattery, Departments of Geological Sciences and Teacher Education, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio 2. Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment 3. Learner-Centered Assessment on College Campuses 4. http://www.flaguide.org/cat/rubrics/rubrics1.php 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ 6. http://www.ed.gov/pubs/IASA/newsletters/assess/pt3.html Read More