The Place of Testing in Teaching Worldview Disciplines: Comparative Historical and Normative Analysis

Abstract

Testing is historically associated not only with educational practices but also with shifts in the mechanisms of social governance and the methods of professional selection. Tests acquired the status of a standardized procedure gradually: from isolated practices to unified, mandatory procedures with clearly defined criteria. The development of psychometrics, the increase in the number of people receiving educational services, and the need to compare results contributed to the formation of testing as a technology focused on objectivity, reproducibility, and scalability of knowledge and skills assessment procedures. However, this process conflicts with the nature of philosophical inquiry, which is designed not only to reproduce existing knowledge but also to be a living practice of creating, analyzing, criticizing, and comparing ideas.

The purpose of the article is to assess the place and role of testing within the teaching of worldview disciplines, in particular philosophy.

The methodological basis of the study is: a comparative-historical method, which was used to study the history of testing, its implementation in teaching worldview disciplines and changes in the role in the educational process; the analytical method allowed us to establish the correspondence of test forms to the levels of Bloom's scale and assess the cognitive complexity and functionality of the test; comparative analysis was used to compare arguments regarding the appropriateness of using tests in modern conditions.

Results. It has been established that the use of tests within worldview disciplines, particularly philosophy, is methodologically justified for assessing knowledge and competencies at the lower and middle levels of Bloom’s taxonomy (memorization, understanding, application, analysis). It has been proven that, provided that questions are correctly created (in terms of content and structure), tests can perform not only a diagnostic, but also a formative function, capable of contributing to the stabilization of knowledge. The structural limitations of tests in assessing levels of achievement and in creating environments that assume autonomy and productive thinking are shown. Attention is focused on the social and epistemological risks of standardized assessment and the need to distinguish between its psychometric effectiveness and social justice.

Conclusions. Testing should be used as an auxiliary tool for basic knowledge assessment in a philosophy course. It cannot replace the discussion, writing, and analytical formats necessary for the formation of conceptual sensitivity and other critically important skills that philosophy and other worldview disciplines are designed to form. The optimal model is the “low stakes” model, in which tests serve a supportive and diagnostic role without decisively influencing the student’s educational trajectory. Further research can aim to rethink the role of testing in the context of digitalization and the development of large language models.