1- Selected Active Methods for Educational Assessment of Learning
2- ISBN: 978-9933-532-70-3
3- Author: Mohamed Ziad Hamdan
5- Language: Arabic
6- Pages: 159
7- Price: 12 $
ABSTRACT
Developments in contemporary information and communication technology have brought about radical and rapid transformations in the content, methods, factors, and services of learning, administration, and education. These include: blended (resident and digital) and online education, the learner-centered pedagogy model, digital curricula, and the dynamic pedagogical assessment of learning tasks rather than comparing learners to the achievement rates of their peers of the same age or academic level.
However, the most prominent risk committed by developing education systems, their teachers in schools, and teachers in higher education institutions is the general teaching of knowledge and memory. Students learn their courses based on knowledge and memorization, and then are tested to retrieve this knowledge with traditional questions whose cognitive requirements do not exceed knowledge and memorization, with little comprehension, leaves them as immature beings, lacking the capacity for complex thinking, decision-making, or advanced future roles.
We sometimes observe, even at the university level, students complaining about the difficulty of tests that ask them (unusually for transient learning and memorization) to apply a specific concept, principle, method, or theory; to make analytical comparisons; to infer organic or specific practical relationships; to propose a relatively new idea or method; or to judge the validity or effectiveness of a piece of knowledge or skill they learned by memorization.
Continuing this educational deviation in learning and teaching knowledge and memorization without elevating the other five higher cognitive abilities in Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy, for example, places young people, families, and institutions in imminent strategic danger. The inevitable result is the production of unthinking generations devoid of logic, critical thinking, or any significant effective institutional role.
Unless teachers and instructors shift from their current traditional teaching of knowledge and memory to higher levels of perception and behavior, and then change their traditional assessment practices, which are often limited in resources and time, to active constructivism during the learning and teaching processes that move individual students to higher intellectual and academic levels, the factories of education (schools, colleges, and universities) will continue to produce weak, unthinking generations, thus contributing to the decline of society in various areas of life and work.
The 159-page book presents an update to the methods of educational measurement and assessment of learning used in traditional collective education for the past hundreds of years. Five chapters are:
1- Assessing achievement based on the observed practical reality of learning
2- Modern special methods in the educational assessment of learning
3- Standardized tests, achievement lists, and Likert-type scales in the educational assessment of learning
4- Essay and objective tests in assessing academic achievement
5- Educational assessment of people with special needs