Strengthening the teaching of mini-practical assessment task in a senior phase technology class

[摘要] English: The study aims at strengthening the teaching of the mini-Practical Assessment Task in a senior phase technology class. The challenge that teachers confront, is the learners' failure to execute this task. This task aims to develop the learners' skills and creative thinking. The theoretical framework that informs this research is constructionism. This theoretical framework has been adopted because it is a theory that examines the development of a jointly constructed understanding of the world, which forms the basis of shared assumptions about reality. This study embraces participatory action research as a research approach. Participatory action research is a philosophical approach to research that recognises the need for persons being studied to participate in the design. Participatory action research practitioners integrate three basic aspects of their work, namely participation, action and research.Teachers need content knowledge to be able to understand the possible challenges that their learners may encounter in a specific topic. The mini-Practical Assessment Task requires critical and creative thinking, as well as decision-making and problem-solving skills. Team teaching between schools should be encouraged to enable learners to receive proper technology content knowledge reports. This study envisages having a successful implementation of the strategy that might assist in improving the practical skills of teachers and learners through the appropriate usage of the mini-Practical Assessment Task.Meetings and discussions with co-researchers have been used for data generation. The generated data have been analysed through a means that would enable the researcher and co-researchers to have a deeper understanding of the phenomenon by interpreting the generated data and reflecting on their interpretations. Critical discourse analysis has been adopted to analyse the data. Critical discourse analysis acknowledges the need to examine, in practical terms, how one goes about doing critical analysis of text and talk. A team of eight technology teachers, one from each circuit of the Amajuba District in the KwaZulu-Natal Province, plus fellow technology subject advisors have worked together as equals in devising ways to strengthen the teaching of the mini-Practical Assessment Task in a technology class.

[发布机构] University of the Free State