Self-assessment of teaching strategies and decision making to improve oral skills of kindergarten and primary school students: the use of EVALOE-SSD
Submitted by:
Marta Gràcia
Abstract:
Context: School is an essential context that contributes to children’s communicative competence. In-class interactions between children and teacher and among children themselves have been assessed with different type of instruments. Decision Support Systems (DSS) are tools that can help teachers to assess their own practice and to make decisions to improve it (Gregg, 2009; Kalay & Chen, 2002).
Aims: Construction, implementation and validation of a Decision Support System (EVALOE-DSS), conceived as a teacher empowerment tool for self-assessment and decision making about their teaching practice concerning students’ oral skills.
Methods: EVALOE-DSS is a multimedia tool based on EVALOE (Gràcia et al., 2015), consisting of 30 items that assess 5 dimensions: teaching management, instructional design, communicative functions and teacher strategies, students’ communicative functions, and students’ management. It includes, also, a brief description of each item and a variety of resources to help teachers to make decisions and introduce the actions in their teaching practice. This project uses a qualitative and quantitative methodology and adopts a multiple case design. The participants are 6 teachers and their groups of students (kindergarten and primary level) of one inclusive school with a bilingual cross-modal project, four inclusive schools, one International school, and one Special Education school. The research procedure includes: design and development of a DSS for each type of school; assessment of children initial linguistic competence; researcher assessment of one classroom observation using EVALOE-DSS; weekly teacher self-assessment of classroom observation and decision making using EVALOE-DSS on the basis of initial researcher assessment, during an academic year; analysis of assessments, decision making and changes in teaching practices; teacher-researcher evaluation of the helpfulness of DSS and introduction of changes; and assessment of children linguistic competence at the end of the academic year.
Results: The results of our multiple case study show that the teachers contributed actively to the implementation of the tool, doing weekly self-assessments, making decisions and introducing changes in their classes. Specifically, their helped the researchers to improve the tool proposing them the introduction of changes and adjustments in the tool. The teachers have improved their strategies and the students, their oral skills.
Discussion: The use of a DSS can contribute to improve teachers’ competence to self-assess and make decisions about their teaching practice and to detect the conditions and strategies that allow students to be more linguistically active, participative, critical and self-regulated while they are carrying on class activities. The reflections and comments of the teachers have been very helpful to improve the multimedia tool.
Gràcia, M. (coord). (2015). EVALOE. Escala de valoración de la enseñanza de la lengua oral en contexto escolar. Análisis de las interacciones comunicativas entre docentes y alumnos en el aula [Assessment scale of oral language teaching. Analysis of communicative interactions between teachers and students in the classroom]. Barcelona: Graó.
Gregg, D. (2009). Developing a collective intelligence application for special education Decision Support Systems, 47, 455-465.
Kalay, P. & Chen, D. (2002). Integrating a Decision Support System into a School, Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 34 (4), 435-452.