Fantasmas, Mitos e Ritos da Avaliação das Aprendizagens

Abstract

Students’assessment has been systematically ruled by implicit beliefs and developed by routine practices, fairly stable in time. We point out, among them, (a) the reproduction of the expositive teaching and positivist assessment models, with which teachers were in touch for a long time before they became teachers, (b) the quest for objectivity in the assessment and its reduction to a grading role, which makes it punitive and tormenting, (c) the systematic and almost exclusive use of teacher-centred teaching strategies to transmit academic knowledge and (d) the use of testing techniques as a systematic and almost exclusive assessment strategy. These beliefs, that behave as ghosts because they deeply condition the way teachers live and think, are created by a myth “ the myth of assessment objectivity “ and support ritualised assessment practices. Against these ghosts, myths and rituals, the investigation results have been almost powerless and the need for innovation, that they demand, has practically remained away from the teachers’assessment beliefs and practices. Meanwhile, the world, the curriculum and the students have deeply changed and demand drastic changes in the ways we teach and learn “ from a teaching paradigm to a learning paradigm “ and in assessment “ from a positivist paradigm to an alternative and constructivist one.