ASSESSING TEACHING PRACTICE EVALUATION PROCESSES EMPLOYED BY A SOUTH AFRICAN TEACHER EDUCATION UNIVERSITY: APPROPRIATE TO ASSESS QUALITY TEACHER EDUCATION AND TRAINING?

Introduction of the use of portfolios for evaluating the quality of skills acquired during the four years of teacher training and development in Higher Education Institutions has been a highlight in the international research on teaching and learning discourses. Also in South African Higher Education sector, this has been the case since the education has been structuring and restructuring their teaching and learning programmes adapting to accommodate needs of school curriculum changes. Research has unveiled a lack of clarity as to how portfolios can be used as tool to develop and produce the envisaged teacher who are reflective practitioners. Results from a cohort of 2014, 2015 and 2016 third year pre-service teachers were analysed along with the instruments used for evaluation of their teaching practice in 3rd year. Two teacher educators (researchers) were appointed to assess these portfolios of the participant cohorts of pre-service teachers and have done reflection on marks obtained by students in each year target for the evaluation. Programme Evaluation was used as a research methodological tool to zoom in at the quality of portfolios (the product) submitted and the content thereof. Results unveiled the poor quality of how inconsistent the assessments were done. There arose a concern of questionable way of how marks allocated by both lectures to evaluate their lesson and marks allocated by mentor teacher lesson evaluations. Results also demonstrated the biasness on awarded marks for each lesson which could possibly be resulting from the way evaluators are selected for evaluating students when doing teaching practice. Evidence presented by portfolios showed the challenge of mismatch of allocation of scores by assessors appointed by the faculty to evaluate subjects that they do not have expertise on. As a result, students’ marks were either inflated or severely reduced due to subjective way evaluators judged their performance. Data collected from portfolios unveiled questionable and suspicious inflated marks due to the lack of standardization of Teaching Practice tools and possibly absence of workshops conducted for evaluators as to how the assessment form is to be used and how challenges that lead to biasness in allocation of marks per lesson could have a rippling effect on the subjects that are clustered together with this subject. Consequently, in the light of the policies on Norms and Standards for teacher education as well as Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education Qualification (MRTEQ) the above facts unveiled the need to improve the compromised quality and attributes expected to be demonstrated by the envisaged graduates in the Further Education and Training programme of the Bachelor of Education at the university where the case study was conducted.