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Domain Testing: Divide and Conquer - Testing Education

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4. Expertise-oriented approaches, which depend primarily on the direct<br />

application of professional expertise to judge the quality of whatever<br />

endeavor is evaluated.<br />

5. Adversary-oriented approaches, where planned opposition in points of<br />

view of different evaluators (pro <strong>and</strong> con) is the central focus of the<br />

evaluation.<br />

6. Participant-oriented approaches, where involvement of participants<br />

(stakeholders in that which is evaluated) is central in determining the<br />

values, criteria, needs, <strong>and</strong> data for the evaluation. (p. 78)<br />

I have used the objectives-oriented evaluation approach in this thesis. I<br />

found this approach to be most applicable to the kind of evaluation I wanted to do<br />

for my training, which was being able to direct the assessment items towards the<br />

predefined objectives. This evaluation method provides the perfect technique of<br />

mapping assessment items to the instructional objectives, which makes it possible<br />

to measure learners’ performance against specific instructional objectives. This is<br />

discussed more in Chapter 4, section 4.05.<br />

3.04.02 Collecting Quantitative Information for Evaluation<br />

In the literature, tests <strong>and</strong> questionnaires have been described as two of the most<br />

common methods employed to collect quantitative information that can be used to<br />

evaluate the effectiveness of an instructional program.<br />

3.04.02.01 Knowledge <strong>and</strong> Skills Assessment<br />

The following are four testing approaches described in the literature:<br />

• Norm-Referenced <strong>Testing</strong>: Worthen et al.(1997) stated that the<br />

principal aim of administering norm-referenced tests is to compare the<br />

performance of one group of learners with the performance of a<br />

different group of learners taking the same test. They contended that the<br />

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