Models and strategies for the evaluation of knowledge and its acquisition: a pilot study

Abstract

Assessment of learning in a way apt to promote students as well as to help them to overcome learning deficiencies is one of the main problems teachers have to deal with. Nowadays, learning is conceived mainly not as adquisition of specific pieces of knowledge -conceptual, procedural and metacognitive- but as integration of new knowledge with old one as well as a restructuring of knowledge schemas. Because of that, it is proposed in this paper that assessment tasks, techniques and procedures are to be designed to tap whether knowledge has been adquired, integrated and restructured according to expert models or not, and in what extent students are able to apply such knowledge. It is also suggested that the validity of the model as well as that of the tasks can be tested through several steps: 1) The study of expert judgement agreement on task and test relevance as model restructuring indicators; 2) the study of correlations between answers to different tasks of the same test, in order to determine change extent, what could be attributed to general reorganization and integration of knowledge schemas; 3) the study of correlations between scores obtained in different assessment procedures; and 4) using task mastering criteria stablisbed by groups of experts to decide whether a particular student can be promoted or not. A pilot study, also presented in this paper, gives some evidence about the viability of the proposed strategy.