Assessment Practices in the Center for Regional and Local Development Studies, College of Development Studies in Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia

Abstract

This research investigates instructor’s assessment practices in the center for RLDS, college of development studies in Addis Ababa University. The samples used for the study consisted of 5 teaching staff (those who thought first and the second year students in 2018/19 academic year), and 17 students from both academic years are randomly selected. In addition, the student’s evaluation results of 4 courses, 2 instructors and 6 students randomly selected for document review and interview respectively. The instrument used for this study were closed ended and open ended questionnaires, an interview and document analysis. The data were analyzed using simple descriptive statistics like percentage and mode as well as the mean scores. The paper tries to give the general over view of how instructors evaluate their student’s academic performance, the criterion and guidelines they used to select a given assessment methods, the effectiveness of their assessment practices to measure the three domains of learning of their students and the assessment methods the instructors in the center used frequently as well as which of these method the students more prefer. The major findings of the study is that, in the center for RLDS, the assessment practice is of summative paper-pencil based used only for grading not for students learning, even though some instructors used course objective as their criteria, there is no general assessment guidelines and criterion used by instructors to select a given assessment method, mark and grading, and the instructors do so arbitrarily and very differently. The frequently used assessment method is assignment and final exam that given for students at the end of the courses while the students prefer assignment, mid exams and final exam that given at different times during their learning. The paper also finds out that there is significant variation among instructors depending on their service year and academic rank in using assignment and final exams. Thus, as the academic rank and service year increases the inclination of instructors to use one or two assessment at the end of the course increases. Finally the study discovered that most students distrust their instructors during evaluation due to the lack of responsibility and accountability on the parts of instructors on marking, grading and letting students to check their results.

Keywords: Assessment, practice, evaluation, RLDS

DOI: 10.7176/JEP/10-4-02