Onfarm Oral Test as a Miniature Formative Assessment to Foster Student Development in an Agriculture Course from a Rural-based University

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-630-7_18How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Student assessments; oral tests; formative and summative; higher education; pedagogy

Abstract

While there is always an ongoing debate on the use of summative assessments over formative assessment especially when student development is prioritized, summative assessments continue to prevail in many higher education institutions, especially in developing countries. Different reasons have been associated with its high application including ease of standardization and comparability both locally and internationally, efficiency and ease of use, policy alignment by many government institutions, and resource constraints, especially in rural-based Universities. Continuous assessments (tests and assignments) often viewed by many as formative assessments can be misleading sometimes because many educators especially those with limited pedagogical knowledge give summative tests. Because of the dominance of summative assessments, oral assessments are considered here as an alternative to assessments with characteristics similar to that of formative assessments since they provide opportunities for real-time interaction and immediate feedback, practical application and verbal communication skills, and critical thinking, especially for students in previously disadvantaged universities surrounded by rural communities with limited opportunity to read and write English. An on-farm oral test is a type of assessment in which students are evaluated in an actual agricultural farm setting. The study, therefore, engaged in a more practical and on-farm assessment of students of concepts learned in a plant science course. This study compared student performances in an oral test to a written test in a plant science module from 2021 to 2024. The third-year course (internally moderated) was taught by the same lecturer for four years. Two tests (T1 and T2) were used to evaluate taught concepts while a field practical testing of the same concepts was used to interview (one-on-one) the students on what they did, how, and why to maintain plant health as an oral test (OT). The recorded marks were subjected to Chi-square of Crosstab analysis and ANOVA using SPSS for student performance percentages and mean performance scores, respectively, where differences were considered at P<0.05. The results showed that students performed best (P<0.05) in mean classmarks for OT (74%, 85%, 82%, and 62%) than in T1 (57%, 49%, 40%, and 31%) and T2 (31%, 50%, 41%, and 30%) from 2021 to 2024, respectively. In T1 only 7.4% of the class scored distinction in 2021 while 0% was observed in 2022 to 2024. For T2, there was no student with a distinction for four years. OT showed the highest (P<0.05) number of students with distinctions (63%, 84%, 88%, and 20%) from 2021 to 2024, respectively. It was also noticed that the student cohort of 2024, was a bit weaker than the rest. These findings indicated the need to factor in more on-farm tests in the field of Agriculture, as students demonstrated improved performance when engaged in a one-on-one discussion.

Copyright

© 2024 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - F. N. Fon
AU  - Z. L. Ndou
AU  - M. Sibanda
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/12/31
TI  - Onfarm Oral Test as a Miniature Formative Assessment to Foster Student Development in an Agriculture Course from a Rural-based University
BT  - Proceedings of the Focus Conference (TFC 2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 328
EP  - 338
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-630-7_18
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-630-7_18
ID  - Fon2024
ER  -