Assessment of Products in Technology and Engineering Lessons

Evaluating and evaluating pupils' knowledge is one of the teacher's most important tasks. Therefore, it seems to us that teachers are educated in this field. Especially with Design and technology, teachers need to be particularly careful because they often evaluate products for which they must have a well-designed criterion, otherwise, deviations or unfair estimates can quickly occur. Therefore, during the graduation thesis we will look at what the product's evaluation of the product is about, the curriculum, what are the guidelines and suggestions. Next, we will look at some concrete examples of the criteria for evaluating products that are currently being used by Slovenian elementary schools. We will also analyse these criteria and look at what their advantages are and what their weaknesses are. We will also present other forms of evaluation at Design and technology, in addition to product evaluation. A large part of the thesis will be dedicated to the usefulness of the criterion evaluation of products. We will present an interview with an experienced Design and technology teacher and present her view of product evaluation. We will then analyse the existing criteria in the Slovenian elementary schools, and highlight their advantages and disadvantages. In Chapter 3.3, we will present our proposal for a Critical Product Evaluation. It will be very simple to be understood, especially by all students, but still sufficiently professional, so that each teacher immediately sees that all the parameters are taken. In the last two chapters (discussion and conclusion) we will deal with answering the questions posed at the beginning of the thesis and giving final thoughts. During the graduation thesis we examined and analyzed several evaluation criteria. We highlighted their advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage is, in particular, that they do not give enough emphasis to assessing the relation to the object and the product, and that the descriptors are written too extensive and incomprehensible. To this end, we have written our example of a criterion, which should be checked in practice, which is a good starting point for further research. KEY WORDS: Design and Technology, assessment, evaluation, criterion-based product assessment