Applied Fields: Education

Consequences of the Developments in Society

Economic and technological change, which brings significant changes in the requirements of the labour market, poses increasing demands on education and training. For many years, the main goal of education has been to make students knowledgeable within a certain domain. Building a basic knowledge store was the core issue. Students taking up positions in modern organizations nowadays need to be able to analyse information, to improve their problem-solving skills and communication and to reflect on their own role in the learning process. People increasingly have to be able to acquire knowledge independently and use this body of organized knowledge in order to solve unforeseen problems. As a consequence, education should contribute to the education of students as lifelong learners.

Paradigm Change: From Testing towards Assessment

Many authors (Mayer, 1992; De Corte, 1990) have pointed to the importance of instruction to promote students' abilities as thinkers, problem-solvers and inquirers. Underlying this goal is the view that meaningful understanding is based on the active construction of knowledge and often involves shared learning. It is argued that a new form of education requires reconsideration about assessment (Dochy, Segers & Sluijsmans, 1999). Changing towards new forms of learning, with a status quo for evaluation, undermines the value of innovation. Students do not invest in learning that will not be honoured. Assessment is the most determining factor in education for the learning behaviour of students. Traditional didactic instruction and traditional assessment of achievement are not suited to the modern educational demands. Such tests were generally designed to be administered following instruction, rather than to be integrated with learning. As a consequence, due to their static and product-oriented nature, these tests not only lack diagnostic power but also fail to provide relevant information to assist in adapting instruction appropriately to the needs of the learner (Campione & Brown, 1990; Dochy, 1994). Furthermore, standard test theory characterizes performance in terms of the difficulty level of response choice items and focuses primarily on measuring the amount of declarative knowledge that students have acquired.

This view of performance is at odds with current theories of cognition. Achievement assessment must be an integral part of instruction, in that they should reflect, shape, and improve student learning. Assessment procedures should not only serve as a tool for crediting students with recognized certificates, but should also be used to monitor progress and, if needed, to direct students to remedial learning activities. The view that the evaluation of students' achievements is [Page 54]something which happens at the end of the process of learning is no longer widespread; assessment is now represented as a tool for learning (Dochy & McDowell, 1997).

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