Educational Assessment: Pupils’ Experience in Primary School (Arabic Grammar in 7th Year in Tunisia)

Abstract

Regardless of the considered instruction level, the evaluation practices applied in classrooms and educational institutions raise a large number of questions. Do these practices reflect the learners’ cognitive metamorphoses? Do formative and summative evaluations aim at accessing knowledge acquisition at the expense of understanding? Is the content of the evaluation approaches and instruments part of the learners’ previous knowledge? What is the relation between this content and the learners’ specific knowledge base? Does the structure of evaluation instruments give access to knowledge construction? Is this structure more oriented towards the evaluation of low-level cognitive skills than to the assessment of high-level cognitive skills? Does the context of the assessment introduce affective variables that may negatively influence learners’ results? Do the used instruments allow systematically determining the learners’ strengths and weaknesses? Do the correction criteria respect the value of each of the learner’s responses to construct a particular knowledge? Are these criteria more influenced by objectivity requirements than by the cognitive value of the responses? All these questions show the complexity and the importance of the evaluation problem in the school environment and in the cognitive progress of the learners. The questions mentioned are rather related to the content of the evaluation instruments, their structure, their objectives and the context in which the evaluation takes place than to the correction criteria. In this paper, we introduce a personalized evaluation environment for mobile learning. We first introduce m-evaluation scenario. Then, we describe this personalization as well as the architecture of the evaluation environment composed of Web services and based on communication between these services carried out via Semantic web technologies. The proposed environment allows implementing an assessment of the learners’ knowledge about a specific teaching content by researching, selecting and generating a test adapted to their level of knowledge. Once the evaluation is performed, a new course will be proposed. We also conducted an experiment based on determining the degree of student’s satisfaction.