The importance of assessing how geography is learnt beyond the classroom

Abstract

Finding out if someone has learnt what you intend for them to learn remains a key issue in geography education. It is certainly not as simple as looking at a student's performance through pen and paper examinations. To extend this concern to the future, we ask if geography educators will be contented that a child has only learnt geographical knowledge-arguably the most easily assessed domain through traditional assessment formats. How do we evaluate if our student is developing skills that will help him/her engage the environment that he/she is living in better? If we aim for attitude and behavioural changes, how will we know that our students have become better custodians of our common environment? Good assessment practices in geography will allow the teacher to determine how well they are teaching and how well the students are learning. Coming back to the theme of the book, the challenge is to extend good assessment practices beyond the conventional classroom to the use of ICT as well as in the field. The twofold challenge of determining what is good assessment and how to extend it beyond the classroom will be discussed in this chapter. By providing the key dimensions to evaluate what good geographical assessment entails, and then extending these to assessment in the field and in using ICT, the reader will be able to engage the issues raised in the subsequent chapters.