Avaliação da aprendizagem escolar realizada por professores de ensino médio

Abstract

The evaluation processes are always present in our daily lives, that is, at various moments or situations in our lives we are submitted to some form of evaluation. The evaluation of learning, in turn, is a constitutive part of the School Education processes. Traditionally, teachers carry out evaluation practices with their students, in which they use the customary written test as the basic evaluation instrument. Most commonly, these tests have been structured to focus on memorizing facts and data, rather than moving to more sophisticated and complex levels of the cognitive process, such as comprehension, application, analysis, and synthesis. Based on these considerations, we structured and developed this empirical research of a qualitative nature, which focused on "evaluating the learning of high school students" and aimed to "understand the evaluation processes developed by high school teachers". It was developed within the Study, Research and Intervention Group "Educational Innovation, Educational Practices and Teacher Training" (INOVAEDUC), and was linked to this group's umbrella research project entitled "Teacher Work Needs in Public Schools for Effective Permanence and Qualified Learning of High School Students in Brazil (NETRADOCEM)". To guide the development of this research, in order to achieve the proposed objective, we established the following research problem: "What main aspects characterize the evaluative practices performed by teachers of Public High Schools, based in Santa Maria/RS?" To help us answer this problem, 05 research questions were developed, namely: (1) For what purposes do teachers working in Santa Maria Public High Schools (EPEM) evaluate their students' learning?; (2) Which categories of the cognitive process are usually considered by high school teachers in their assessment of learning?; (3) What types of content do high school teachers usually cover when assessing their students' learning?; (4) In what ways do high school teachers use instruments to assess their students' learning?; (5) How are there influences on the assessment processes of student learning developed by high school teachers?.We used three sources for information collection: (1) Subjects: teachers working in Public High Schools (EPEM); (2) Documents: evaluation instruments used by these teachers; (3) Spaces of social interaction: class councils held in public high schools. To collect information, we used the following instruments: (1) Interviews, conducted with 16 teachers working in Public High Schools; (2) Textual Analysis Scripts, used for the two types of learning evaluation instruments analyzed: written tests and assignments; (3) Observations, carried out in the sessions of 11 class councils in public high schools. For the organization and treatment of the information collected, we used the basic guidelines of the so-called "Grounded Theory". The analyses performed allowed us to conclude that: (1) the prescriptions coming from the legal regulations and the realization of class councils are constitutive elements of the evaluative processes developed by high school teachers; (2) the teachers, even though limited by different factors, enjoy a certain freedom to perform their evaluative practices in the classroom; (3) the evaluation processes carried out by the studied teachers keep characteristics of formative evaluation and also of summative evaluation, with the presence of several evaluation moments during each quarter of the school year, but, in general, focusing on the attempt to give opportunities to the students to recover the grade and not necessarily to accomplish learning that was not previously accomplished; (4) in high schools, the presence of traditional evaluation practices is still very strong and already incorporated in the school culture, making the evaluation of learning understood, most of the time, as something natural and easy to do.