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Browsing Journal Articles by Subject "Assessment"

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    The assessment of environmental education concepts and skills in Grade 10 Geography
    (The IIE, 2017) Ferreira, Johanna, G; Molala, Khosi.N.I
    Sustainable development and environmental crises have been recognised globally as relevant to education and teaching. This research explores opportunities and challenges to assess environmental education content, skills and values in the latest Grade 10 Geography curriculum policy document in South Africa. Geography has been lauded as the ideal vehicle to raise awareness and to sensitise learners to environmental issues. The subject’s curriculum contains the best opportunities to address environmental and sustainability issues. However, it is unclear whether teachers develop and assess the skills and values needed by learners to identify environmental issues and to solve them. Qualitative research was undertaken with data collected through document analysis and interviews were held with purposively selected participants. The findings reveal that though there are ideal opportunities to develop environmental skills and competences through assessment, these are not realised in practice. The teachers involved in the research have inadequate knowledge of the concept ‘environment’ and limited familiarity with appropriate pedagogical approaches. Recommendations are made to address the identified shortcomings.
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    Fairness in using negative marking for assessing true/false questions.
    (The IIE, 2014) Haffejee, Firoza; Sommerville, Thomas, E.
    Multiple choice questions are a popular method of testing as they are easy to mark. However, they also lend themselves to guessing. True/False questions are particularly prone to guessing. This can be alleviated by deduction of marks for incorrect answers. The University of KwaZulu-Natal currently uses true/false questions in its assessments, which are answered by means of pencil-and-paper sheets that are optically scanned, marks being calculated according to a standard formula. A trial of a proposed new computer program revealed mark discrepancies compared to the current scheme. This study evaluates the program’s marking scheme ‘internal negative marking’ – whereby an overall negative mark for an item consisting of a stem and several true/false questions is ‘rounded up’ to zero. We enumerate the cause of the discrepancies, demonstrate that the latter scheme diminishes the penalty for guessing and may encourage strategic students to leave out parts of the curriculum when studying.