Skills Development: Vocational Education
in the Islamic Countries
21
background, in order to compete in the job market. Thus we need to assess the performance of
institutions at both “macro-level” (either national or state level such as OIC countries) and the
performance of students in the institutions at “micro-level” (at vocational institutional level).
In the previous sections, it was highlighted that policy making in OIC countries is paramount at
national or state level for vocational institutions towards improving the quality of tra ining.
Macro-level assessment procedures are often carried out inmany countries, where they are seen
as the best way of ensuring uniformity of standards across the nation (MacDonald, Boud, Francis,
& Gonczi, 1995; Winther & Achtenhagen, 2009). Since macro-level assessment is aimed at
examining all institutions to ensure uniformity of standard, external assessment may be
operated by authorized administration controlled by the nation or agent which might not be
biased during assessment (e.g. Normally an agency completely independent of all the
institutions in which students are enrolled). Authorities responsible for administering external
assessments operate in the public domain, are under close scrutiny, and are usually monitored
and regulated by government.
External assessment authorities are likely to have highly organised procedures for processing
assessments and detailed operational systemswhich can copewith awide range of eventualities,
some of which may only rarely occur. Such authorities often respond to and reflect national
policies on education and training and may be accountable to government(MacDonald et al.,
1995). External assessment systems throughout the world normally use a combination of
examiner-marked and teacher-marked assessments. The assessments shouldmeet the needs of
all types of students seeking qualifications at any given level and meet the needs of a nation’s
social, economic and political imperatives. Thus, the external assessment is aimed at examining
students at a national level by issuing them with standardized exam that are in line with the
national policies already established by the government.
At themicro-level, the assessment is primarily done at institutional level by instructorswith an
interest for collecting evidence and making judgment to the extent and nature of progress
towards the performance requirements set out in a learning outcome. The inst ructor may use
either summative or formative assessment. He/Shemay use formative assessment (such as test
and assignment) with an interest for providing feedback as part of learning process or
summative assessment (such as marking final exams) with a focus for making judgement of
student’s work.
As vocational educational institutions aremore practical oriented, some assessment may not be
applicable in most of the courses. Thus, in this section, we shall mainly focus on micro-level
assessment that are suitable to vocational education as developed by National Centre for
Research in Vocational Education (NCRVE) (Stecher et al., 1997, p. 18) . These include four major
categories of assessment strategies: performance tasks, written assessments, senior projects,
and portfolios.
 Written assessment: the instructor prepares a prompt comprising of printed
document (question or graphic or tabular combination of either of these) or an object,
an event or an experience requiring student response in a fixed period of time. These
restrictions are meant to standardize the testing condition. There are basically three
types of written assessment- i) multiple-choice tests that is aimed at gathering facts, ii)
open-ended questions (constructed-response) that requires short answers, iii) essays,
problem-based, and scenarios (constructed-response) that require extensive exhibition
of mastery of knowledge content.