MONITORING OF STUDENT PERFORMANCE THROUGH PEDAGOGICAL TESTS

The relevance of this paper is caused by the new requirements to the educational process, and the monitoring and evaluation system in particular. Control is becoming increasingly important, both for teachers and the students. Monitoring events are changing their character shifting from traditional forms to the authentic ones – those involving the use of relevant assessment tools. It is shown that pedagogical tests designed as a specific set of tasks make it possible to give an objective, comparable and even quantitative assessment of the quality of training in the specified educational area. The paper describes the basic types of test tasks aimed at checking various indicators of student performance. The authors analyze the long-term use of pedagogical tests to monitor student performance of the Department of mathematics and Applied Informatics at Samara State Technical University. The paper presents the data analysis of the statistical characteristics of certain tests before and after the alterations made, which reveals the opportunity for correction and updating of the test tasks while preserving the quality indicators of their reliability and validity. It proves the validity of the applied tests. It is shown that the creative abilities of the students can be measured by means of tests of the third and fourth levels, which use the transformation of academic content and interdisciplinary connections.

Long-term practice of using a complex of different combinations of test tasks allows talking about testing as an effective means of objective monitoring and make the conclusion about the appropriateness of pedagogical tests application to monitor student performance.