As described in the authors' master thesis from 2003 a cognitive model to measure the actual advances of learning progress and teaching quality is to be introduced. The idea is to define a two dimensional system to classify what kind of activities students have to undertake to reach the aims of the actual module (how deep is their understanding) and the level of the problem they deal with (level factor).
The first dimension
A student has to solve a problem, to answer a question or to deal with a practical task. Whatever he or she does, there are 4 steps that always have to be done:
- know some facts (mostly terms)
- know some methods (defined route to solve a problem, ordered facts, simple processes)
- acquire the competence to evaluate methods, to chose one out of many that seems top be the best in a given situation
- acquire the competence to apply methods to situations never seen before, modify known methods to improve them for better fitting a current situation
Whatever we learn, we learn it using the same biological mechanism that can be cut down to the 4 steps above. Thus, when asking students a question in a test we can always decide, which one of the four steps to acquire the required competence is actually demanded. Of course mostly more than one part will be necessary, but then we have to ask whether the question or task is too complex and should be broken down or possibly we measure more than one thing in a task, that is no problem, but should be done carefully.
For students with disabilities, the ability to measure cognitive progress is imperative in order to create instructional strategies and defined curriculum to address their academic needs. By creating diagnostic measures to help students show what they know and understand how they process cognitive functioning, the cognitive method is a definitive measurement of students learning and processing progress.
An evaluation of these 4 stages of learning depth can be done by linear stepping (other scales are discussed but rejected because they were not understood by the students) using factors 1-4 for the stages. The only problem here comes up when we think about the relation of different requirements for starting a learning module. One student has other preconditions than the other. In normal classes there are the most differences by age, social background and earlier educational step. In classes with students having some, possibly different disabilities, perhaps on different levels, these preconditions are widespread and evaluation becomes much more critical as it will be discussed in the third article of this series. The second part will come up with some idea about the second dimension - the level factor, that is a first step to find evaluations based on the students actual situation.
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Note: Some ideas are academic, others from the
testsuite project, lead by the author
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Some ideas of this article are the basis for testsuite