Final assessment in teacher education: innovations for better learning experiences

Abstract

Learning assessment is an essential part of the educational process, and it is even more important when dealing with Teacher Education courses. Assessment procedures will be present throughout the future teaching career of students and, moreover, can be understood as another opportunity for knowledge construction, either in the preparation for exams or as practical experience. The educational practices of Teacher Education courses need to be in constant innovation to ensure that the educational quality extends to the schools. The present article brings the first findings of an Action Research in Education that aims to promote improvements in the final evaluation of a Pedagogy course. The text is structured in a reflexive-propositional dialogue of students and examiners' speeches with the scientific literature about the theme. In this first phase of the qualitative research, semi structured interviews were carried out with eight Pedagogy students and five examiners in the same course. The results identified two main issues: psychological suffering of students and lack of information about the final assessment. From that, changes in the assessment process of the course were put into practice to follow up the action research that, currently, is in the second moment of evaluation with students who are going through the final assessment with new practices.

Keywords

• higher education; teacher education; educational evaluation; action research; psychological factors.