Abstract:

The developments in society and the economy around the world require higher education to equip young learners with new knowledge, skills, and values. Its purpose is to allow learners to benefit from the emerging forms of socialisation and actively contributing to the economic development of the country. The challenge in the study is that assessment instruments used in higher education seem not to cover the skills and values domains required in the world of work. Research shows that most of the assessments only cover the knowledge domain of the Blooms trilogy.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the systematic assessment of knowledge, skills and values in higher education using the systematic assessment inventory. Participants were 268; of these 50.7% were female and 49.3% male lecturers at the study University of Technology in South Africa. The question asked was: To what extent do lectures systematically assess the knowledge, skills, and values in their assessment instruments in higher education. A quantitative exploratory method was used. Data were collected through the systematic assessment inventory. SPSS was used to analyse data using frequencies and percentages. The results showed that in terms of Sphericity, Kaiser-Meyer Olkin (KMO) was .90, which was statistically significant (p < 0.05). Reliability for the entire scale computed in terms of the internal consistency was found to be .97. In terms of assessing knowledge, the results revealed that 96% of lecturers were explicitly assessing the knowledge domain. With regards to assessing the skills, the results indicated that slightly above a quarter 42% of lecturers were explicitly assessing the skills domain. In terms of assessing the values, the results showed that about a quarter of 26% of lecturers was explicitly assessing the values domain. It is critical that higher education lecturers are empowered to assess the skills and values in all their assessment instruments.

Keywords:

Assessment, Blooms trilogy, knowledge, skills values, cognitive, psychomotor, affective higher education.