Abstract:

The modern economic model called the knowledge-based economy is challenging the higher education by demanding the preparation of highly qualified workers who are capable of adapting quickly in a working environment and solving problems in a productive way. This is consistent with the idea of an expert-student expressed by some researchers already for many years and a viewpoint that higher education institutions should create the necessary preconditions for student development towards the expert-level performance. In this context, it should be noted that experts relate concepts in meaningful ways and possess more qualitative structural knowledge that is defined as an understanding of relations between concepts in a domain. It means that that the creation of meaningful relations between taught concepts should be supported in the study process. However, new trends in the field of higher education (physical and virtual mobility of students, employment during study time, availability of learning resources on the Web, etc.) have led to the situation when university teachers almost completely have lost influence on what knowledge students acquire and how they structure it. It allows anticipating that students’ structural knowledge contains many false and incorrect relations between concepts. At the same time, the new economic model calls for changes in teaching and learning practice of higher education institutions through promotion of a student-centred approach. In the field of assessment, it puts at the forefront a formative assessment which is considered to be an assessment for learning. Nowadays formative assessment is not anymore understood as a teacher-led checking and commenting of students' completed works but as a regular process promoting students' self-regulation, reflection, autonomy, and responsibility for learning through the use of collaborative self- and peer-assessment methods. Summarizing all aforesaid, a research problem in this paper is formulated as a discrepancy between modern trends in higher education in general (the student-centred approach) and in formative assessment particularly (use of collaborative self- and peer-assessment methods) and difficulties to attribute them to the assessment of students' structural knowledge. A hypothesis is defined that students’ structural knowledge assessment using collaborative self- and peer-assessment methods reduces the quality of students’ structural knowledge although students find the mentioned methods as benefit-bringing. To prove the hypothesis, a true experiment of repeated measures design with counterbalancing was implemented with participation of 192 students. In the experiment, students assessed structural knowledge in the same study course 4 times during a semester and each time they used a different assessment method (individual, pair-based and group-based peer assessment, as well as group-based self-assessment). To reveal the quality of students’ structural knowledge, concept maps created by students before and immediately after the use of each assessment method were analysed. To acquire understanding of benefits provided by each assessment method, students were asked to self-evaluate their knowledge level at the beginning and at the end of each experiment repetition, as well as they completed a questionnaire at the end of the semester. The paper presents the detailed description of the conducted experiment and the deep analysis of the results acquired.

Keywords:

Self-assessment, peer-assessment, structural knowledge, higher education, true experiment.