The influence of theoretical concepts on the practice of assessing the quality of knowledge in the 1920-1930s

Glazov State Pedagogical Institute named after V.G. Korolenko, Department of Mathematics and Informatics, Glazov, Russia

¹ Corresponding author: vladykina07@mail.ru

Abstract

A significant component of higher education didactics is the assessment of the quality of students’ knowledge, which allows determining the effectiveness of the work of the participants in the educational process. Assessment of the quality of students’ knowledge, considered at various levels, is of interest not only from the standpoint of modern didactics, but also in the historical aspect. Theoretical representations of teachers of the 1920-1930s on the assessment had an impact on the practice of organizing the work of universities. The selected chronological framework (1917-1939) is characterized by active transformations in the educational sphere, significant development of pedagogical thought. The study aims to substantiate the development trend of the practice of assessing the quality of students’ knowledge on the basis of theoretical ideas of teachers of the period under review. The work employs a general theoretical modeling method aimed at building basic models for assessing the quality of students’ knowledge. In addition, special historical and pedagogical methods were used: historical-structural, historical-comparative and constructive-genetic ones. The employment of these methods makes it possible to describe the main structural components of assessment that occur during the studied period of change and identify the main trends. The result of the work was the identification of the main models for assessing the quality of students’ knowledge at various stages of the period under consideration: authoritarian control, control based on the “teacher-student” interaction and self-control, as well as control based on the “teacher-student” interaction with the leading role of the teacher. The representations described in the pedagogical literature of that period, which posed the basis for building these models, had a significant impact on the practice of higher education. The novelty of the work consists in identifying the main tendency of strengthening the teacher’s priority when assessing the quality of students’ knowledge in the “teacher-student” interaction.