21st Century Social Studies Assessment

• Home
• Abstract
• S.S. Learning & Assessment Objectives
• Defining Assessment
• Examples of A.A.
• Advantages of Traditional Assessment
• Disadvantages of A. A.
• Disadvantages of Traditional Assessment
• Advantages of A. A.
• Why we need Change
• Challenges & Controversies of A. A.
• Recommendations
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Feedback

Defining Assessment

  In the process of answering our first question, we need to understand what exactly the word assessment means. The root of the term “assessment” is assidere, which is also the root of the French asseoir, to seat or set. It was first used in the sense of setting the value of property to apportion a tax. Assessors traditionally make a site visit -- they inspect the property or the situation and its documents, they categorize its functions, they hear from the owner of the property, they evaluate it by setting it against already-existing standards, and so forth. The assessment requires time, as well as interaction between the assessor and the person or property being assessed, so that the congruence of perception with reality or, in our case, the congruence between underlying mental processes and surface observation, can be verified. The idea here is that the product is not sufficient evidence of the quality of the thinking processes that produced it. Based on this meaning of assessment, we stumbled upon our second probing question. Our O level SS paper sat in 1 ½ hrs, is it truly what true assessment is all about? Ask yourself whether our O Level SS paper fits the underlined phrases.

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