Assessment for learning: Science teachers' ideas on assessment of core competences in science understanding

Abstract

This study has two objectives: to describe the nature of the main competencies to acquire in the context of experimental sciences and its implications for assessment, and to analyse the kinds of task preferred by teachers for their assessment. Four basic competencies, whose importance is specially underlined in the Spanish curriculum, have been considered: Conceptual understanding, Scientific text comprehension, Tables and graphs understanding, and Use of scientific thinking. Five different complexity levels for assessing the degree of each competence acquisition have been established. Our data, obtained from a sample of 30 Spanish Secondary School teachers, show that teachers tend to assess mainly Conceptual understanding no matter the level of difficulty, secondly, Use of scientific thinking conceived as solving standard problems, and finally, assessment of Text, Table and Graph understanding presents a great scattering, depending on the level of task difficulty. ANOVA results show that, in general, tasks implying lower levels of cognitive demand are used more often than most difficult tasks. Finally, to identify teachers' profiles in relation to the kinds of task they use, a correlation analysis has been done. © 2012 Fundación Infancia y Aprendizaje.