THE EVALUATION PROCEDURES USED IN TEACHING ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION AT THE ELEMENTARY LEVEL IN ASSAM

Periodic assessment/evaluation of learning outcomes helps in deciding the attainment of students in the subject area, suitability of learning experiences provided, learning strategies adopted and the appropriateness of the curriculum in general. In this regard, it is an integral part of curriculum construction and renewal process. In Environmental Education, evaluation concerns with objectives in Cognitive, Affective and Psychomotor domains and hence a teacher should make use of a range of assessment techniques for measuring these learning outcomes. The document „Habitat and Learning‟ of the National Curriculum Framework (NCF, 2005) highlights this by stressing “since the development of appropriate attitudes, skills and values is to be the most significant component of EE in schools, developing a scheme to assess student‟s achievement on these aspects will perhaps be the most crucial in determining the success of interventions through the EE curriculum”. This brings forth the need for grounding student teachers in the use of various evaluation techniques by actually providing them with situations to understand and practice these techniques and tools as part of “Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation process” in Environmental Education. This would help the student teachers understand the present learning levels of children but also how to use them in their day-to-day classroom practice. Based on the text and curriculum, written tests, examinations can be conducted to evaluate one‟s understanding, perceptions, applied knowledge about the subject and the values which one committed for, could be done through summative evaluation. In formative evaluation, apart from measuring the performance through the marks obtained ones‟ understanding about the surrounding environment, environmental concerns, observing best practices and processes can be assessed. This method can be applied to evaluate practice lessons, usage of innovative methodologies, experiments, group studies, brainstorming, observation, interviews, field visits, educating the mass/community etc., which establishes linkage with the immediate environment, and how they develop their perceptions and communication skills in the classrooms. This can help evaluate broadly inside and outside classroom learning. The assignment of developing projects should be based on teacher learners‟ immediate environment. It can be taken up by individual or by group. But it is desirable that the topic which they select should be such that they experience in their day to day life. Through this students‟ performance/ efficiency can be assessed. Whether such innovative practices have been used in Assam is very much questionable. Therefore, this study entitled „The Evaluation Procedures Used in Teaching Environmental Education at the Elementary Level in Assam.‟