engleski

Relationship of teachers' perception of students' knowledge and real students' knowledge acquisition

The goal of the research is to establish the relationship of teachers' perception of students' knowledge according to performance evaluation and real students' achievements, and to what extent the teachers' opinions are balanced when evaluating the importance of the used questions for biology. 65 teachers evaluated students' performance and used questions, from 5 to 9 evaluators for each tested elementary and high school class. Agreement among the evaluators was tested by Fleiss Kappa coefficients. Students' knowledge acquisition was tested on-line by using Ampyx and Moodle system, on the total number of 8691 pupils from 41 elementary and 36 high schools. The data about the misconceptions noted by biology teachers were collected on the county teachers councils of elementary and high school biology teachers during 2010. The results show that there is no agreement among the evaluators regarding the performance evaluation (К from 0.07 to 0.19), whereas the agreement regarding the importance of questions is very low or there is no agreement at all (К from 0.15 to 0.38). It is also noted that the teachers tend to expect better students' results for those questions they themselves consider more important. Very low agreement among evaluators about the difficulty of questions and importance of certain concepts in biology points to the problem of non-existence of teaching standards. The misconceptions identified by the research are systemised into groups depending on the causes of their occurrence. Very high results of teachers' evaluation of students' performance come as a consequence of teachers' high expectations, i.e. their belief that the students solve the tasks with as much attention as it is given to them by the teachers during classes. Persistence of misconceptions in biology teaching indicate that the teaching methods need to be changed with the aim of eliminating misconceptions.

biological concepts; teachers' expectations; knowledge perception; students' achievements

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