Yes / Included in methods commonly used for assessing vocational training are oral assessments (OAs) since, in addition to assessing knowledge to a depth rarely achieved in other forms of testing, they give unique insight into students’ personal attitudes, which are important factors in the workplace. However, OAs require considerable preparation by the assessors, they can be restricted by time and assessor allocation, it is difficult to fully cover the course fairly, and they can put undue stress on the examinees, hence hindering a true expression of their skills and knowledge.
OAs can give insight into a student’s personal attitudes, and the purpose here is to find the relationship between OA observed attitudes and those deduced from the computer-aided assessment.
For the computer-aided assessments a scheme based on comparing two statements, followed by fuzzy AHP analysis, was used to determine the student’s attitude on such topics as general safety, work area tidiness and cleanliness, care and good use of hand tools and accuracy and testing of equipment. The results from the computer-aided approach were then compared with attitudes on the same topics obtained by oral assessment.
For this work the important result was that there were strong correlations between the OA observed attitudes and the computer-aided assessment derived attitudes of the students. It also became clear however that for safety, the attitude of students (and perhaps workers) is more complicated than just having a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ attitude. Social pressure and organisational influence do seem to play a part so influencing or masking the student’s true attitudes.
Satisfactory correlations were found between results of students’ attitudes when tested using the OA and computer-aided methods. Further work would need to be done to confirm generalization of substituting OA methods with a computer-aided assessment method.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/11540 |
| Date | 05 December 2012 |
| Creators | Adair, D., Jaeger, M., Pu, Jaan H. |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Conference paper, Published version |
| Rights | © 2012 The Authors. Full-text reproduced with author permission. |
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