PROCEDURES FOR ASSESSING COGNITIVE SKILLS OF PROSPECTIVE LANGUAGE TEACHERS
The purpose of the research was to find out how the procedures for measuring students’ cognitive skills could be incorporated into the university course Language Teaching Methodology. The study was organised within a framework of Anderson’s theory of cognitive skills development and Glaser’s taxonomy of dimensions for assessing achievement. We developed the instrument, which encompassed two empirical questionnaires for treatment groups. Both questionnaires comprised an equal number of tasks but differed in the content of procedures for measuring knowledge acquisition and structure as one of the dimensions of cognitive assessment. Empirical Questionnaire 1, based on a traditional approach to assessment, included multiple-choice questions related to the lecture material. Empirical Questionnaire 2 comprised both traditional and unconventional measures, such as a SVT test; constructed and conversation-based responses; simple and high order rule tasks. Thirty-four third-year students of the Department of Foreign Languages, V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University participated in three-stage research-oriented teaching, which lasted ten weeks. Both qualitative and quantitative data analysis methods were employed for the evaluation of learning outcomes. After final testing, we compared the results obtained from the students. The group mean difference (EG vs. CG) was 0.12 points, 95% confidence interval (0.07 - 0.17), two-sample t-test p < 0.0001. Findings suggest that cognitive skills assessment considerably affects and improves student learning. The implications relate to final grades assessment and curriculum design and contribute to expanded uses for cognitive skills testing.
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