Please listen to the importance of formative assessment in the below videos (see link below). An assessment that has been badly used and purposefully ignored by education institutions. I wonder why?? Perhaps tough on instructors since it needs hard work and long commitments in providing continuous feedback for students....Yet, this might be torturing for teachers who have large classes. For administrators and educational managers, it is not beneficial cost-wise, since this will push them to limit class sizes, although they always boasted about student focused approaches..etc, which does not make sense in reality: how can an instructor provide 100% commitments to all his students ( too many) via using active pedagogies and , subsequently, require the use of formative assessment. It is time for higher education instances to rethink their assessment tools and methods and humanize education experiences for all our future generation.
The hype about and spread of fear about ' common exams' ; ' mid-terms' ; ' finals' ....ect need to be stopped. Instead, we need to train and recruit responsible, well trained and ROUNDED faculty with SOUND ethical and professional stamina. A PhD in ' X, Y. Z CONTENT' will never be a fair and sufficient standard to rely on. Genuine professional, pedagogical and curriculum 'know what' and 'know how' is key in this endeavor. Only those who have the pedagogical know how and the real feel of what practice ( profession) means could design these innovative, practical yet well monitored assessment tools and methods. Still, higher education policies need to be changed as well: reduce number of class sizes, rethink recruitment standards and discard non-sense whimsical, amateurish and selfish political considerations in the recruitment phases. Also, faculty should be considered as professionals and not puppets or mere teachers/transmitters of of textbook content!!!!, who can teach ' whatever course' or ' 'handle whatever class size'.
The hype about and spread of fear about ' common exams' ; ' mid-terms' ; ' finals' ....ect need to be stopped. Instead, we need to train and recruit responsible, well trained and ROUNDED faculty with SOUND ethical and professional stamina. A PhD in ' X, Y. Z CONTENT' will never be a fair and sufficient standard to rely on. Genuine professional, pedagogical and curriculum 'know what' and 'know how' is key in this endeavor. Only those who have the pedagogical know how and the real feel of what practice ( profession) means could design these innovative, practical yet well monitored assessment tools and methods. Still, higher education policies need to be changed as well: reduce number of class sizes, rethink recruitment standards and discard non-sense whimsical, amateurish and selfish political considerations in the recruitment phases. Also, faculty should be considered as professionals and not puppets or mere teachers/transmitters of of textbook content!!!!, who can teach ' whatever course' or ' 'handle whatever class size'.
Here is the link folks:
