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Brikena XHAFERIIntroductionAssessment is a very important part of learning. Applying a test at the end of theterm or year is very common; however, new teaching methodologies encourage ongoingassessment to follow students’ progress and improvement over the term oryear. Chan (2010) points out that teaching should be continuously monitored andrenewed in order to ensure that teaching, course objectives and learning outcomesare up-to-date. In the academic settings, assessment is viewed as closely relatedto instruction. “Until recently the assessment scene in EFL\ESL classes has beendominated by summative evaluation of learner achievement focusing on mastery oflinguistic points”(Shankar 2008, p.183). Nowadays, Institutions of higher educationare facing many challenges due to societal changes. With these changes, universitieshave to change their teaching methodologies which focus more on assessing studentcommunicative competence. The equipment for teaching is modern, practical andenables optimal services for application and interactive learning.The South East European University where the present study is done, wasestablished in 2001 and it is a multilingual University in Macedonia. Teaching isdelivered through new methods of teaching including technology and teachers usedifferent assessment methods to follow the students’ progress closely throughout anacademic year. Investigating teachers’ and students’ attitudes is very important inmaking this process easier and more effective.The research questions which will guide this study are:Q1. What are the students’ and teachers’ attitudes toward continuous assessmentin Higher education?Q2. What are the challenges that teachers face while implementing continuous assessment?Literature reviewAssessment is a new concept introduced recently in education instead of concepts“tests” and “exams”. The term assessment began to be used in education in early1970s and in 1986 Hurtle has distinguished five functions of assessment used inhigher education in the USA (cited in Heywood, 2000). This was considered asconstructive approach to assessing students’ knowledge and progress. Educatorshave been searching for the alternative assessments for a long time. They wantedto find other methods of assessment except the traditional ones. Interest inalternative types of assessment has grown rapidly during the 1990s, both as aresponse to dissatisfaction with multiple-choice and other selected-response testsand as an element in a systemic strategy to improve student outcomes”. “The field ofevaluation has witnessed a major shift from strictly summative testing tools to andAlbanian Journal of Educational Studies 46

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