Expert assessment in education: features, functions and types

Abstract

The article covers various approaches to defining the notion of "expert assessment in education or pedagogical expert assessment". It has been found that pedagogical expert assessment is seen as a system of researching pedagogical phenomena, processes, problems, pedagogical activity results as well as forecasting the development of education, expert assessment of alternative solutions and identifying the best results of the educational process arrangement in order to improve the quality of education and provide counseling services to authors and staff in educational institutions. On the other hand, expert assessment is seen as a complex of scientific and research procedures aimed at summarising the information received from experts to enable competent decision-making in the field of educational institutions management. It is highlighted that expert assessment is significantly different from such notions as "monitoring", "diagnostics", "audit" and "inspection". That is to say that the main purpose of monitoring is to prevent any possible failures in effective functioning of an object, while expert assessment maintains its development. Diagnostics can be conducted by any individual with the help of certain methods aimed at identifying the causes of positive and negative outcomes. One of the features of audit is that educational authorities are invited by the head of an educational institution. Inspections identify whether or not schools meet the requirements and standards of the industry and make conclusions. In addition to the above, the key functions and types of expert assessment in education have been defined (analytical, developmental, counseling, diagnostic, reflexive and forecasting).

Keywords

• diagnostics; expert assessment; expert assessment in education; expert method of research; monitoring; pedagogical expert assessment.