Abstract
Since 1998, South Africa’s education system has been characterised by a series of curriculum policy changes, one of which, in the Economic and Management Sciences (EMS) for General Education and Training (GET) Phase constitutes Accounting, Economics and Business Studies. Before the introduction of EMS, Accounting was taught as an independent subject from grades 8 to 12, however, EMS brought its own challenges around its implementation.
This particular system used the traditional paper-based approach as one of the instruments in the classroom to measure learner achievement. It was found that it could be teacher-centric, leaving learners as passive recipients of knowledge and not allowing them to show true understanding of standards. Significant amongst the criticism of the changes in the Accounting curriculum were the learners entering the Further Education and Training (FET) Phase with a lack of basic knowledge and skills, poor performance and declining numbers of those opting to take the subject, restructuring of old and new topics in the syllabus, and new ways of teaching and learning which have caused anxiety among Accounting educators. Thus, the use of computer technology to assess Accounting content at school level in Gauteng schools remains unexploited.
The study describes the design of the online assessment in which an authentic online assessment activity was crafted to support grade 10 learners’ understanding of basic Accounting content knowledge. This study used Reeves, Herrington and Oliver's (2006) characteristics of authentic assessment as a framework to guide a new approach to design assessment activities that will allow learners to apply their knowledge and skills to various real-world settings. The Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) for Accounting (2011) and the Annual Teaching Plan (2014), which includes the topics and content to be covered within each topic, were used to design the question items. The authentic online assessment was conceptualised through the theoretical perspective of the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, a framework that classified the online assessment questions at the different cognitive levels. Computer software, Questbase with multimedia resources...
M.Ed.