Knowledge testing plays an important role in the educational process as feedback. It is a necessary element of the teacher’s work. The following types of control are used in the school: preliminary, current, periodic and final.
Preliminary control is used to determine the initial level of learning of students. Based on the results obtained, the learning process is adapted to the characteristics of this contingent of students. V.A. Sukhomlinsky recommended that a teacher preparing to work in the first grade, 1.5-2 years before the start of classes, begin collecting information about their future charges, their health, relationships in the family, and study the thinking of children.
It is very important for a primary school teacher to establish the initial state of the cognitive abilities of each individual student in order to rationally organize the learning process. The peculiarity of a modern school is that the learning process is designed for a certain average student, who does not actually exist. Therefore, the teacher, on the one hand, does not use all the cognitive abilities of some students, and on the other hand, builds the learning process on the knowledge and skills that another part of his students do not have. And this requires individualization of learning. The difficulty for the teacher is aggravated by the fact that the level of preparation of those entering the first grade varies significantly. It turns out that well-prepared children quickly study the lesson material and their teacher has to artificially slow them down, thereby holding back their development. Therefore, after conducting preliminary control, the teacher has to work to bring the students to the required level.
Current control is carried out at each lesson, therefore it is prompt and diverse in methods and forms. It consists of observations of the students’ educational activities, their assimilation of educational material, completion of homework, formation of educational skills and abilities. Such control performs an important feedback function, therefore it should be systematic and of an operational nature, i.e. it is necessary to control the performance of all important operations by each student. This allows you to record the mistakes made in time and correct them immediately, preventing the consolidation of incorrect actions. If during this period only the final result is controlled, then correction becomes difficult, since an error in the final result can be caused by various reasons. Operational control allows you to promptly regulate the learning process according to emerging deviations and prevent erroneous results.
The question of the frequency of current control is not simple, especially since it performs other functions besides feedback. If during the control the teacher informs the student of his results, then the control performs the function of reinforcement and motivation. At the initial stage of forming the skill of action, control by the teacher must be carried out quite often, and subsequently it is gradually replaced by self-control in various forms. Thus, during the training, current control changes both in frequency and in content, as well as in the performer.
The teacher must use the information obtained as a result of monitoring in order to determine rational methods and techniques for further work with students and continuous management of their cognitive activity.
Based on the results of the current monitoring, the teacher evaluates the student’s academic performance and assigns a grade. In doing so, the possible impact of the grade on the student’s academic work should be taken into account. If the teacher decides that the grade will not have the desired impact on the student, he or she may not assign it, but limit himself or herself to an evaluative judgment. In this case, the student should be told that the grade was not assigned because it was lower than the one he or she usually received, and also indicate what he or she needs to do to get a higher grade. When assigning an unsatisfactory grade, the teacher should first find out the reasons for the poor response and then decide whether to assign an unsatisfactory grade or apply the technique of deferred assessment.
In primary school, when implementing ongoing control, various specific means are used to show students and teachers their answers: colored signal circles, multi-colored signal cards, traffic lights, rulers, etc.
Periodic monitoring (also called thematic monitoring) is usually carried out after studying important topics and large sections of the program, as well as at the end of the academic term. In addition, periodic monitoring should be carried out when systematic errors and difficulties are detected in students. In this case, corrections are made, the necessary explanations are given, and the skills and abilities of academic work are refined. Therefore, the purpose of such monitoring is to determine the level of mastery of knowledge on a particular topic.
Organizing such monitoring requires compliance with the following conditions:
– preliminary familiarization of students with the timing of its implementation;
– familiarization with the content of the control and the form of its implementation;
– providing students with the opportunity to retake the test in order to improve their grade. The form of periodic monitoring can be varied – a written test, dictation, presentation, test, credit, etc. However, it is best to use ready-made tests. An important requirement for periodic monitoring is the timely communication of its results to students.
The best option is to announce the results immediately after the test, when each student still has a great need to know whether he or she has completed the work correctly. However, this is not always possible, but a mandatory condition should be to announce the results at the next lesson, where the mistakes made should be analyzed, when the students’ emotional intensity has not yet cooled down. Only under this condition will the control contribute to a more solid assimilation of knowledge and the creation of a positive motivation for learning. If the results of the control are announced only after a few days, the children’s emotional intensity will have already passed, and working on the mistakes will not bring results.
The final assessment is carried out at the end of the academic year, as well as when transferring to the next level of education. Its purpose is to establish the level of preparation that is necessary to continue education. It is usually carried out in the form of a final assessment, test, essay, exam. Based on its results, the success of learning in a given subject and the student’s readiness for further education are determined.
The method of control is understood as the method of actions of the teacher and students to obtain diagnostic information about the effectiveness of the learning process. In the practice of school work, the term “control” usually means checking the students’ knowledge. Control of skills and abilities is not given enough attention, and meanwhile, for primary school, it is skills and abilities that should be subject to control the most. As V. A. Sukhomlinsky noted, the goal of education in primary school is to teach a child to write, count and read fluently, and these are skills!
The following control methods are most often used:
Oral questioning is the most common method of control and consists of students’ oral responses to the material studied. It is necessary for most lessons, since it is largely of an educational nature. A questioning before presenting new material determines not only the students’ state of knowledge of the old material, but also reveals their readiness to perceive the new. It can be conducted in the following forms: conversation, story, explanation of an experiment or diagram, etc. The questioning can be individual, frontal, combined, condensed.
Oral questioning at the board is very common and can be conducted in various forms. Of interest is the option of a condensed questioning by “three”, when three students are called to the board, differing in their academic success – strong, average and weak. The teacher asks one question for all three students, but the weak student begins to answer it. After him, the average student continues to answer, who usually corrects and supplements the answer of the weak student. Then comes the turn of the strong student, who, despite good previous answers, may have nothing to add. Then the teacher asks the next question, etc. In another option of the “three” questioning, any three students are called to the board at the same time. The first of them answers the question, the second adds or corrects the answer of the first, then the third comments on their answers.
This method not only saves time, but also makes the question competitive. This form of questioning requires students to be able to listen attentively to their comrades’ answers, analyze their correctness and completeness, and promptly construct their own answer, which is why it is usually used in middle and high school.
Oral questioning in class is also not so much a knowledge check as one of the varieties of ongoing repetition. The most experienced teachers understand this well and devote the necessary time to it. Observations of teachers’ work show that the greatest expenditure of time on oral questioning is observed among the most inexperienced and the most experienced teachers.
Young teachers tend to delay the survey due to a lack of experience in its rational organization. Experienced teachers divide the survey into two phases: the entire class listens to the answers of only good students, and when weak students answer, the rest of the students are busy with written work. This method allows the teacher to survey all students – both
strong and weak, devoting sufficient time to weak students and at the same time not reducing the active work of strong ones.
Requirements for conducting an oral survey:
1) the survey should attract the attention of the entire class;
2) the nature of the questions asked should be interesting to the entire class;
3) you cannot limit yourself to only formal questions such as: “What is called …?”;
4) it is desirable to arrange the questions in a logical sequence;
5) use various supports – visual aids, plan, structural diagrams, etc .;
6) students’ answers must be rationally organized in time, without dragging out the survey;
7) take into account the individual characteristics of students: stuttering, speech defects, temperament, etc .;
8) the teacher should listen carefully to the student’s answer, supporting his confidence with gestures, facial expressions, words;
9) the student’s answer is commented on by the teacher or students after it is completed; it should be interrupted only if the student deviates to the side.
Written survey is rarely used in primary grades – it is gradually introduced from the 2nd grade and becomes the leading one in senior grades. Its advantage is greater objectivity compared to oral survey, greater independence of students, and greater coverage of students. It is usually conducted in the form of short-term independent work.
A common form of written assessment is a mathematical dictation (not to be confused with an educational dictation used in elementary grades). Its specific feature is a strictly limited, fairly short time for its completion. In elementary school, dictation is conducted for a short time, which is its advantage. The disadvantages of dictation include the ability to check only students’ knowledge in a limited area.
The test is usually conducted after studying important topics and sections of the program. It is an effective method of control. Students are notified in advance about the test and preparatory work is carried out with them, the content of which is the implementation of typical tasks and exercises, short-term preparatory independent work. To prevent cheating, assignments are used in variants, usually at least 4, or individual assignments are given.
Checking homework in primary school is the leading method of control, which allows daily checking of the assimilation of educational material, identifying gaps, and adjusting educational work in subsequent classes. Such checking is usually carried out in the form of checking notebooks, which is quite a labor-intensive job for a primary school teacher. Less labor-intensive is a random cursory check of notebooks during a lesson. Peer checking of homework is also used, but children should be gradually prepared for this form of checking.
Test control has come into widespread use in our schools quite recently. Tests in education were first used at the end of the 19th century in England, and then in the USA. At first, they were used mainly to determine some psycho-physiological characteristics of students – reaction speed to sound, memory capacity, etc. In 1911, the first test for determining the human IQ appeared, developed by the German psychologist W. Stern. Pedagogical tests themselves began to be used at the beginning of the 20th century and quickly became popular in many countries. For example, in the USA, 47 million test forms are used annually to test schoolchildren. In Russia, in the 1920s, a collection of test assignments was published for use in schools. However, by the decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) “On Pedological Perversions in the System of People’s Commissariats of Education” in 1936, they were declared harmful and banned. Only in the 1970s did the gradual use of performance tests in individual subjects begin again. Now the use of tests in education in our country is experiencing a rebirth. The Testing Center of the Ministry of Education of Russia has been created, which is conducting an experiment on conducting centralized testing of schoolchildren and university applicants. The State Final Attestation and the Unified State Exam are also conducted using tests.
A test is a set of specific tasks and questions designed to identify the level of assimilation of educational material, as well as the standard of answers. Such tests are often called learning tests or achievement tests. They are aimed at determining the level that a student has reached in the learning process. There are tests to determine not only knowledge, but also skills and abilities, there are tests to determine the level of intelligence, mental development, individual personality traits, etc.
Tests are usually used in middle and high school. In primary school, the use of tests is limited due to teachers’ insufficient familiarity with them and little experience in using them. However, sets of tests have been developed for junior grades in all subjects. Tests of basic skills are used quite widely: reading speed, writing, arithmetic operations, mental arithmetic. Computer tests are also successfully used, but they should be treated with caution.
In addition to pedagogical tests, there are psychological tests, for example, tests to determine memory capacity, attention, temperament, etc.
The advantages of tests are their high objectivity, the ability to quantitatively measure the level of learning, saving the teacher’s time, the ability to use mathematical processing of results and computers, etc.
In school, tests with a choice of answers to questions (selective test) from the proposed options, of which there are usually from 3 to 5, are usually used. The disadvantage of such tests is a fairly high probability of guessing the correct answer. Tests are also used where it is required to fill in a gap in the text (substitution test) by substituting a missing word, number, formula, sign, or establish a correspondence between several statements (correspondence test). However, correspondence tests for younger students should be used with caution due to the complexity of their perception.
When processing test results, each answer is usually assigned a certain score, and then the resulting sum of points for all answers is compared with some accepted standard. A more accurate and objective assessment of test results consists of comparing the resulting sum of points with a predetermined criterion that takes into account the necessary range of knowledge, skills and abilities that students must master. Then, based on the accepted scale, the sum of points is converted into a grade.
Modern didactics considers a test as a measuring device, a tool that allows to reveal the fact of assimilation of educational material. By comparing the completed task with the standard, it is possible to determine the coefficient of assimilation of educational material by the number of correct answers, therefore, tests are subject to rather strict requirements:
– they should be sufficiently brief;
– be unambiguous and not allow arbitrary interpretation of the content;
– do not require large expenditures of time for execution;
– allow to obtain a quantitative assessment of the results of their execution;
– be suitable for mathematical processing of results; be standard, valid and reliable.
Tests used in schools must be standard, i.e. intended for all students and tested for validity and reliability. Test validity means that the test detects and measures exactly the knowledge, skills, and abilities that the test author wanted to detect and measure. Test reliability means
that the test shows the same results when used repeatedly under similar conditions. The difficulty of a test is judged by the ratio of correct and incorrect answers to questions. If students give more than 75% correct answers to a test, then such a test is considered easy. If all students answer most of the test questions correctly or, conversely, incorrectly, then such a test is practically unsuitable for control. Didactics believe that the most valuable test tasks are those that 50-80% of students answer correctly.
Developing a good test requires a lot of work and time from highly qualified specialists – methodologists, teachers, psychologists, as well as experimental testing on a fairly large contingent of students. Nevertheless, the use of tests will expand and gradually spread to primary and pre-school education.
Testing in primary school has the advantage of allowing the teacher to quickly obtain a snapshot of the level of learning for the entire class in just a few minutes. Therefore, testing can be used in almost every lesson. This encourages all students to work systematically, which increases the quality and strength of knowledge. However, not all indicators of students’ mental development can currently be determined using tests, for example, the ability to logically express one’s thoughts, to present facts in a coherent manner, etc. Therefore, testing must be combined with other methods of knowledge control.
Many teachers develop their own tests on subjects, which, of course, have not been tested for validity and reliability, so they are often called internal or educational.
When compiling a test, the teacher must adhere to the following requirements:
– include in the test only the educational material that was covered in class;
– the proposed questions should not allow for double interpretation and contain “traps”; correct answers should be placed among the proposed answers in random order;
– incorrect answers should be composed taking into account typical errors and look plausible;
– answers to some questions should not serve as a hint for other questions.
The teacher can use tests compiled in this way for current control. The duration of such a test should not exceed 8-10 minutes.