5th Global Conference
Thursday 8th May - Saturday 10th May 2008
Budapest, Hungary
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Session 8: Changing Teaching and Evaluation
Chair: Bill Tait
Separating Learning and Evaluation
Mark Dobbins
Royersford, USA
Learning and evaluation are two very different tasks, so why do most education institutions treat them as one? The classroom is a place of learning, and evaluation can be disruptive to the pure act of learning. Furthermore, an individual may be an excellent teacher but a poor evaluator, and vice versa, so there is no reason for the same person to hold both jobs. Finally, where evaluation is needed at all, it needs to be as fair and objective as possible. How can the need for fair and objective evaluation be served by disparate and subjective evaluators? How many students take a class because the teacher is “easy” regardless of the quality of the education they will receive? This paper will explore four categories of learning (Knowledge, Logic, Craft, and Art), the subjects which these categories relate to, the means of evaluation that are best suited to each category, and situations in which evaluation may be unnecessary. Testing in the classroom does have the advantage of simultaneously testing the subject matter as well as “real-world” skills, like teamwork and meeting deadlines, so this paper will also discuss means of evaluating those skills outside of the classroom through apprenticeship and long-term group projects. An understanding of these topics can lead institutions to establish a system of evaluation not integrated with the classroom. Finally, this paper will briefly explore some of the auxiliary benefits of decoupled evaluation from learning, including: increased ease and practicality of independent study, a natural reduction in cost of education for motivated students, teacher accountability, and a much needed shift in power in favor of the students.
Postgraduate Students’ Needs on Supervision: A Case Study
Norhasni Zainal Abiddin
Department of Professional Development and Continuing Education,
Faculty of Educational Studies,
Universiti Putra Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia
This paper investigated the needs of postgraduate students for supervision. The survey was conducted among 200 postgraduate students studying at one of public university in Malaysia. The respondents were from second year of study doing Master/Phd by research and from two major disciplines of study namely science and social sciences. The reason for choosing second year students onward as respondents being that they are more experienced and exposed to information and services and close relationship with supervisor only occurred for those who are doing project paper or thesis. The objective of the study is to identify the importance of supervisors’ contribution to various aspects of postgraduate study. Respondents were asked how important they perceived their supervisors’ input were in different aspects of postgraduate study. Respondents were asked to indicate their perception of the accessibility of supervisory aspects according to a predefined scale (1 = Inaccessible; 2 = Moderately accessible; 3 = Very accessible; and 4 = Not applicable). There were five aspects namely managerial input, research input, academic input, language input and interpersonal input were examined. The details about the investigated items are as follows: Managerial input: Planning, Organizing, Directing, Monitoring, Time-management. Research input: Topic selection, Literature review, Research proposal, Research methodology, Statistical procedures and analyses, Academic input: Discipline/subject field expertise, Tutoring, Mentoring, Assessing, Evaluation. Language input: Language rules, Scientific writing skills, Reading skills, Referencing techniques, Editing skills. Interpersonal input: Oral and written communication, Motivation, Counseling. The results revealed that postgraduate students have different needs at the different phases of postgraduate studies. As a higher education system, they may need to consider various ways in which these needs can be met.
Teachers’ Knowledge, Professionalism and Teacher Education: Some Reflections
Maria
Leonor Borges
School of Education of the University of Algarve,
Portugal
This paper addresses the issue of teachers’ professional knowledge and professionalism, and focuses on the importance of teachers’ practical knowledge to their professional development.
Teacher knowledge is seen as a sum of different kinds ok knowledge (subject matter, curricular, teacher education, experiential) with diverses sources (institutional biography, life experience, etc) (Tardif, 2002; Day, 1999). This praxeologique knowledge, tacit held and neither rational or explicit and, often, no spoken, emerges as “private theory” that legitimate teacher practices (Eraut, 1994, Esteves, 2002; Perrenoud, 1993, Van der Maren, 1995). In this sense, teacher is regarded as “the producer of their ‘own’ profession” (Nóvoa, 1992), the principal agent in their professional development.
If we want to improve quality in teacher education the study of the construction and expression of teacher knowledge is one of the main ways with implications on teacher education (preservice and inservice) that higher education can’t ignore.
The reflection presented in this paper reports to an undergoing collaboratively research about primary teachers pratical knowledge in Portugal.