Percepción del alumnado sobre la evaluación en Geografía e Historia en 3º y 4º de Educacion Secundaria Obligatoria (ESO)

Abstract

ABSTRACT The information about the practical objects of evaluation and about the procedures, criteria and instruments of evaluation and qualification, from the student point of view, supposes a material of great value to understand better the reality of our classrooms and to understand the causes of the academic results in social sciences, as well as the degree of joint responsibility in the same ones on the part of the student body. In this respect, on having gathered the appraisals of the students on the evaluation of the learning, also we are obtaining his opinion about the education of the faculty. For this reason, one of the aims of this work is to elaborate an instrument to collect trustworthy information, which allows us to know the perceptions that have the students of 3. º and 4. º of Secondary Education (ESO), in relation to the evaluation process in the field of social sciences, geography and history. From this very point we hope to know the views, beliefs and patterns of conduct of these students, using the analysis of the information students have about the criteria, procedures and instruments of evaluation - finding out the importance granted to the test, mainly, - habits of study, expectations on academic outcomes and their opinion about the mark received. This project is mainly focused on this concrete collective due to the fact that at this very moment, compulsory schooling finishes. It has been programmed to use evaluation strategies that allow us to verify the achievement of competencies and, therefore, the opportunity to get a first academic degree. A quantitative methodology has been applied in this study, through a combination of mixed sampling that incorporates the random simple sampling and the convenience sampling. It has been carried out with a sample of 1117 secondary students in their 3rd and 4th year in the Region of Murcia. In each of the phases, different procedures, scenarios and informants were used. The instrument used was an original scale formed by several items grouped in different factors, which is the generic name of EPEGEHI-1 scale, which presents good psychometric attributes, throwing a few data that reveal significant relations between the influential variables in the final perception of evaluation. Moreover, the perception of the secondary students on the evaluation of History, aims to establish the relationship between the model of teaching and learning skills that develop historical thinking. The analysis demonstrates, among other aspects, the benefit of changing the cognitive model of teaching history and the need to seek an evaluation model that favors and evaluate historical thinking, since what prevails in tasks (mainly tests) are repetitive and rote questions rather than learn to identify the relevance of an event explaining the causality of it or know how to judge reasonably on their own. An important aspect of the study was the analysis of possible sources of variation and discrepancies between the qualification obtained and the ones students hope to get at the end of the course in history according to the information received on the evaluation criteria and the practice of certain studying habits. The results suggest that better-informed students has a lower difference among the expected and the obtained mark, however, between those who claim to not know the evaluation criteria, the difference is higher.