USING ALTERNATIVE ASSESSMENT TECHNOLOGIES TO PROMOTE ACTIVE LEARNING

Abstract

The author tries to define alternative assessment as an act of acquiring and analyzing information
about students for a purpose, identifying and diagnosing the special educational needs of
education and informing planning for further actions. It forms an integral part of the process of
providing support and educational wherewithal. This information includes knowledge about an
individual’s personality, way of thinking and style of learning, as well as it helps to discover
his/her cognitive abilities, environmental status, academic achievement and social competence.
In this paper we consider each type of assessment, highlight the relative strengths and
weaknesses of each one, and discuss how teachers can choose among many options with two
primary considerations: the importance of the effect and the crucial need to use multiple sources
of information.
The article also dwells on the effective ways of developing alternative assessment to promote
active learning. Our next step is the sharing of the results of the survey methods we consider
particularly productive in assessing alternatively. To reach our aims we organized a range of
experimental lessons, conducted surveys with questionnaires and organized a debate to prove
that set of activities chosen by us can enrich and reinforce the students’ comprehension of
alternative assessment, as well as it can stimulate the usage of alternative assessment in the
practice of teachers