Educación para el desarrollo y la ciudadanía global. Una propuesta de evaluación en el ámbito formal

Abstract

ABSTRACT International Cooperation requires an assessment of Development Education as a guide to understanding, evaluating and making decisions that improve the efficacy and impact of its actions. This study focuses on demonstrating how a tool used in the field of formal education can be used to assess Development Education and Global Citizenship Education (DEGCE). Competence-based learning is an educational technique that can be applied in many fields and teaching environments; it is flexible and adjustable to precise objectives, and its evaluation allows us to assess, in a concrete way, the results related to the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values and attitudes of the beneficiary population. Through a descriptive analysis, we have compared DEGCE with social civic competences. We found a strong relationship between them in terms of content, teaching-learning method, and evaluative approaches. This implies that the diagnosis of Social and Civic competences serves as an indicator of achievements and provides relevant and useful information to evaluate the present state of DEGCE in formal ambit. Furthermore, in addition to being a very important source of access to real data, it also serves as a model for DEGCE assessment. The Andalusian Agency for Educational Evaluation, the only one in Spain to evaluate exhaustively Social and Civic Competences, provided, among other data, the scores obtained in each one of the items. The database corresponds to the population segments that are required to take the test according to the Education Act in force in the 2010-2011 academic year: students aged 10 and 14 years from all 2470 primary schools and 1607 secondary schools. It is therefore not a sample but includes all of the students that fulfil the condition: 178579 in total. A non-experimental and cross-sectional data analysis design has been applied for data analysis, where the variables are not deliberately manipulated, and the data refers to a single moment in time. This gives an overview of the state of the DEGCE in the Spanish region of Andalusia that offers information on the knowledge, skills and attitudes of students in the areas of Equality, Human Rights, Migration, Ecology, Development Goals, Humanitarian Aid and more. The linkage of the DEGCE to the competency based learning approach, implemented in schools and high schools, brings advantages both to the field of cooperation and to the field of education; throughout the extended trajectory of the DEGCE there have been developed many innovative didactic materials, that are applicable to the acquisition of social and civic competencies and which can be used as resources by educational centres. Similarly, the competency based learning methodology, already well established in teaching practice, guides and facilitates the integration of the DEGCE into the formal field; an objective of the European institutions for decades. Keywords: Evaluation of Development Education, Development Education and Global Citizenship Education, Diagnostic assessment, Social and civic competence, Competency based learning assessment.