Primeros Abordajes Cualitativos respecto de las Concepciones de Docentes Contables sobre Evaluación de los Aprendizajes

Abstract

Nowadays, teachers in high education seem to be demanded not only to know how to transmit specialized knowledge, but also to develop specific pedagogical knowledge and skills to meet the new roles as facilitators, communicators, guiders and servers of the future professional development of students.
Faced with this reality, in an institution of higher education with a primarily professionalist training (Faculty of Economic Sciences of the National University of La Plata, FCE-UNLP), it is necessary to promote teaching practices and skills to improve the quality and performance of their work. This involves encouraging discussion and reflection of our own teachers with the aim of promoting in them a shared vision of what, how and when to incorporate knowledge that is related to the teaching-learning process, beyond the specific knowledge that has trained them as economic professionals.
Teaching in higher education has often been nurtured by general frameworks from teaching, pedagogy and educational psychology without taking account of the development of conceptual tools to understand the peculiarity of teaching a specific discipline.
This work proposes to describe a research into the educational concepts in teaching Economics Sciences. It seeks to contribute to conceptualize a key stage to improve teaching in this particular field and in higher education in general terms: the evaluation of learning.
This research is framed in an interdisciplinary project developed by members of the Pedagogical Unit and the Institute of Research and Accounting Studies, accredited and funded by the National University of La Plata², which focuses on the evaluation, thinking that it is part of the teaching-learning process and is the feedback of the teaching and the learning.
In this paper the first approaches of an essentially qualitative research are discussed. It aims to identify the assessment of learning, and the concept that teaching and learning are deeply intertwined. Its purpose is to identify the main teachers´ concepts in the accounting area.
In this research the theoretical and conceptual framework is defined because researchers training, their knowledge and experiences guide the work and influence the results. Therefore they should be made explicit.
One method to rescue how teachers think and in what knowledge their actions are based that not distort that information is through the narrative of their own experiences. The purpose of including this type of survey is to allow them to make the exercise of discovering the forms of action and their own beliefs underlying in their own story, as well as the discovering for themselves the achievements and accomplishments that often they carry on without recognizing them. Keep in mind that most of the teachers do not have specific pedagogical training.
The conceptions of teachers regarding to evaluation, are studied through evidence that is collected by semi-structured interviews, which are then supplemented by surveys, discussion groups that promote reflection on the practices, and the analysis of specific assessment tools used by the accounting chairs.
Professors and heads of teaching assistants of the accounting area were selected as key informants because within the organizational structure of the faculty, they are who share their culture, and especially those who define in each accounting chair, the form, content and timing of theoretical an practical evaluations, within the framework of regulations.
Interviews allow not only gather information, but simultaneously and in dialogue with the other, joint best practices assessment by an interactive mode between the gathered information and the reflection among the various actors involved in the research. In this paper, the results of the analysis of a sample of 12 interviews with key informants are shared.
In the analysis of qualitative data it is not always possible to define an overall strategy or procedure, but it starts during the fieldwork (Rodríguez Gómez, Gil Flores and García Jiménez, 1996). In this case the process was performed with a degree of systematization. It covered the following tasks defined by the aforementioned authors: data reduction, disposal and processing them in a matrix of double entry, and getting results. Thus, their common features and trends are selected in order to identify some core concepts and relevant issues conceptions of evaluation. These results certainly will provide some evidence as a basis for designing surveys.
We expect that this research will promote the definition of concepts and new practices that improve the quality of evaluation in accounting subjects, especially make teachers more sensitive to this subject area, allowing them to become aware of the implicit knowledge they have and assess themselves in the practices they use, recognizing whether they are relevant or need to be revised based on that they do focus on real student learning and not just in the accreditation of knowledge taught. Thus teachers will redefine their role and practices in terms of more autonomous form, reflective, creative, etc., that will prepare students to meet and deal with the constant change and complexity and uncertainty of their professional future.

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² Evaluation in Economic Sciences: Teacher´s Concepts and Practices. A Model for Best Practices. Accredited to and funded by the National University of La Plata for the period 01.01.2014 to 31.12.2015.