Abstract:

In the academic year of 2011/2012 a program was launched at the Faculty of Informatics of the University of Debrecen, Hungary to test the knowledge of the freshmen on the field of Informatics and Computer Sciences. This year and in the following 695 students were tested, altogether. The primary aim of the test was to see how the students are prepared for their following studies in the field of Informatics and Computer Sciences, how the faculty would be able to rely on the students’ knowledge gained in secondary education. In advance to the academic test a self-assessment test was completed by the students, where on a 0-5 Likert-scale the students were asked to evaluate their knowledge of the indicated sub-field of Informatics. In the follow-up section of the program elementary and secondary school teachers of Informatics and Computer Sciences were given a questioner. The questioner contained the students’ test and the teachers were also asked to fill in the tests. In addition to each task the teachers were asked to give an assessment on the students’ performance and on the importance/necessity of the given task. The two additional questions were the following:
- In your opinion, what is the students’ average result in percentage?
- In your opinion, how important/necessary the knowledge is that the task is meant to test?
In this article we are focusing on the spreadsheet knowledge of the students. We will compare the students’ results, the self-assessment values of theirs, the teachers’ results, the teachers’ assessment on the students’ performance, and the students’ results from their maturation exams on the very same field.
The spreadsheet knowledge was tested with six tasks. One theoretical question was asked in connection with functions hlookup(), vlookup(), match() and index(). Following the theoretical question a screenshot of a table was presented and five questions were asked. Four among the five tasks were to create both syntactically and semantically correct spreadsheet formulas, while the fifth one was to give a natural-language explanation of a single-result array formula.
The students’ results on the spreadsheet tasks reached 20% neither of the two years. The results of our research, however, clearly indicate that both the self-assessment values and the teachers’ evaluation values significantly overestimate the students’ performance. Comparing our results to previously tested self-assessment evaluations the students’ overestimation on self-assessment is not surprising, it is a well-established phenomenon. However, the overestimation of the students’ results by the teachers is rather alarming, since it means that the teachers of Informatics are not aware of their students’ knowledge.

Keywords:

Spreadsheet knowledge, self-assessment, teachers' assessment.