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TESTING AS THE MEANS OF MANAGING THE QUALITY OF CONTINUOUS EDUCATION
M. I. Vishnevskij E. V. Kravets
The fundamental orientation point of educational activity is guaranteeing the optimality of quality.
The term "quality of teaching" is widely used in modern science, though differences are noticed not only in the definitions of the appropriate concept, but in the principal approaches to its interpretation. In pedagogy the quality of education is usually understood as "correlation of aim and result", "criterion of attaining a goal". There is another approach, which interprets the quality of education as the correspondence of its results and the demands of a personality, society, state, or narrowly, as the correspondence of educational services and the demands of consumers, in particular, demands of students. The traditional pedagogy considers that teachers, lecturers, administration of educational establishments, authority of the system of education in much greater extent understand the needs of students, than the students themselves. It must be noted, that this thesis is in need of essential elaboration and specification.
The considerable growth of the role of continuous education is the particularity of the modern educational process. The conception of continuous education forms the basis of educational policy in most highly developed countries of the world. They all seek their own model of continuous education. We have the understanding of continuous education as a pedagogical system, representing the totality of ways, methods, and forms of obtaining, intensifying, and broadening the secondary and professional education. In so doing, we associate principal differences between the system of continuous education and the traditional system with the fact that continuous education aims not only to master a certain volume of knowledge and practice, but also to develop precept and ability to study the whole life. Continuous education is called up to insure the possibility of effective entering into the modern life on a basis of methodological training, knowledge of general tendencies in economic and socio-cultural development, abilities to orient oneself in a constantly growing flood of information, piercing through our being.
In accordance with the indicated positions, setting excessive hopes on administrative resources and in general on an external influence exerting on a personality in the process of its formation and meeting educational demands, seems to be rather unconvincing. If on a level of pre-higher school education one can speak, with a certain portion of conventionality, about the conformity of the given approach to the real state of affairs, then higher education adds
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essential amendments, and the experience of post-graduate education allows to conclude that making formation of teaching programmes and organizing teaching activities, the positions of actual consumers of educational services, including employers, must be taken into account first of all. State educational standards accumulate essential social experience concerning educational activities, but they represent this experience in its averaged form, fixing a certain norm or even a minimally needed level of education. A consumer can concretize these needs. Determination and clear formulation of the educational demands on all levels of education and in conformity with all categories of consumers is a very difficult, but very important task.
The concept of quality embraces an entire totality of substantial characteristics of an object or, as Hegel wrote, definiteness identical with being. The quality often has a complex structure, unapproachable for direct measuring on the whole, in all its completeness; quantitative parameters of certain components of its characteristics are measured. The adequacy of representation the quality of a given object depends on how successfully these characteristics were chosen. The problem of measuring the quality of education is connected not only with adequate choice of characteristics which are to be defined, but with the choice of instruments, necessary for measuring and quantitative description of these characteristics.
According to the UNESCO definition, the quality of education combines the following elements: guaranteed realization of minimal standards of education; the ability to set goals in different contexts and achieve them in accordance with the input indexes and context variables; the ability to meet the demands and expectations of main and indirect consumers and interesteci parties; the aspiration for perfection. In order to carry out the correct evaluation of the indicated elements of the quality one can use different methods, both objective and subjective. The necessity of wider use of different measuring procedures, allowing to mathematize the evaluation of qualitative parameters of educational activities has been accentuated recently. Test technologies are traditionally considered to be one of the basic facilities of this kind.
We consider testing to be the element of quality of education management on a basis of students' knowledge and abilities evaluation. Tests reflect precisely a certain standard of education: knowledge, abilities, and skills which students must possess, as well as those tasks they must be able to solve.
Many researchers believe that checkup of the degree of mastering a comparatively simple teaching material is more accessible for test diagnostics than deep understanding. That's why it's often referred to, that tests evaluate only the skill to operate with facts, but not the development of abilities. Moreover, it was
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more than once mentioned that testing gives the opportunity to elicit talented and gifted trainees, by doing this justly and objectively.
One of the purposes of the test control is finding out exactly what knowledge, skills, conceptions, abilities, should be and may be measured. In principle, tests can measure the same criteria as the traditional forms of checking up, and can not insure things, those can not.
Tests can quite solidly measure a factual level of possessing knowledge (the ability to recognize, reproduce the fundamental facts, data, terms, definitions, formulations, formulae, principles, laws of the discipline studied) that is everything, that can be remembered, acquired, learnt, and then reproduced. In the same solid way, tests measure an operational level of possessing the teaching material (performing activities and operations according to an acquired pattern, practice, rule, algorithm), that is the ability to do everything that can be learnt.
It's sometimes pointed, that tests can not measure the ability to carry out heuristic analysis and fulfill operations without a certain simple algorithm. The given level of adopting knowledge relies on a guess, intuition, and it can't be leant without having certain promises and abilities. The heuristic analysis differs from a really creative method in the only fact, that though the result is unknown to a student, and is going to be his personal discovery, heuristic tasks have a clearly settled standard of solution (answer), and therefore yield to test measurement.
Creating a serious test is a business for professionals, because a test is an instrument for measuring. Tough demands are made on it. As is well known, to create a scientific test it's necessary to make a choice of: (a) methodology, or the theory of substantiation the methods of creating a test (the classical theory, used basically before 1920s - 1960s, and the modern one, based on the ideas of latent-structural analysis are distinguished); (b) a certain theory of pedagogical measurements (to measure something, it's necessary to single out the object of measurement; it means to decide conceptually what is going to be the knowledge in each concrete case); (c) pedagogical theory of tests (conceptual apparatus, forms of tasks, methods of choosing the content etc.).
Speaking about the use of tests for managing the quality of education we can notice, that the effective management may be formed up only by monitoring of the currant, final, and distant results in education. In this connection tests are characterized by the range of indicators, which they possess being the instrument of evaluation the quality of education. So, they allow organizing a regular, but not an occasional control, which helps to open up the dynamics of changing one or another property or feature. Test tasks allow diagnosing the
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process of teaching, the formation of knowledge, abilities, skills, and not only the results of this process. Tests come out as rather an informative material, which gives the opportunity to open up causes of trainees' mistakes, defects in teachers' work, to discover factors, which influence the quality of education.
The main directions of work on using tests in managing the quality of continuous education seem to be the following:
First, the creation and regular perfection of tests, as the instruments guaranteeing the objective measuring of the level of students' knowledge;
Second, organization and conducting attestation measures on all stages of continuous education process (pre-higher school, higher school, post-graduate);
Third, the creation of data base for providing the control of quality of education;
Fourth, a systematic comparative analysis of the quality of education in different educational establishments;
Fifth, training teachers to use methods of objectification, while evaluating the level of mastering the teaching material.
Translated by authors
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