Formative assessment is a concept commonly employed in scientific and professional pedagogic discussions in recent years. This thesis investigates how school counselors are implementing formative assessment principles during their course of developmental-preventative work.
The first part of the thesis places the concept of formative assessment, as described various experts in the field, into a wider educational context. Five fundamental principles of formative assessment are then listed and their utilization in education services is described. Additionally, we describe and critically evaluate three fundamentals formulated specifically for our region, by local Slovenian experts on the topic. The second part of the thesis presents the role of the school counselors in realization and implementation of formative assessment in their developmental-preventative and counseling work. The end of the theoretical part investigates the principles and the elements of formative assessment in the context of school counseling work. We present the characteristics of the counseling process that a school counselor conducts according to the formative assessment. As an important feature of this process, we highlight the cooperation of the school counselor with teachers and class teachers and we present examples of formative supervision in school counseling work.
In the empirical part of the thesis we conducted a semi structured interview with the specialist from the School board of RS, who presented the concept of formative assessment both in the education process as well as transfer of the concept to the school counseling work. We were interested to investigate how the concept was adopted in classes, as set up by the School board of RS, and the reasons behind including the concept in the work of school counselors. Additionally, we conducted four semi structured interviews with school counselors who employ formative assessment in their work. In this, we were primarily interested in the counselors’ understanding of the concept, where they first encountered it and how they are using and realizing specific elements and principles of formative assessment in their counseling work. Furthermore, we were curious to know how important is the cooperation of the school counselors with teachers in realizing the concept in developmental-preventive as well as counseling work. We were also interested in benefits and drawbacks of using the concept in their work, as perceived by the school counselors.
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