Universal evaluation as a proposal to assess teacher’s performance. Social representations of preschooler teachers in Cuauhtémoc, Chihuahua

Abstract

Mexico is going through a series of changes that have come to touch one of the main nuclei of the education sector: the performance of its teachers. The universal evaluation was one of the key proposals to evaluate performance parting from the implementation of the Integral Reform of Basic Education (IRBE). The way in which it was received by the teachers, their stance regarding this new object, are shaping the social representations (SR) allowing to identify a panorama about the attitudes, the information they have about the subject, the interpretations and beliefs that conform as social group about this process that, normatively, is based on raising the educational quality of the country. Based on the previously stated, it was considered important to identify the SRs that preschool teachers in the city of Cuauhtémoc have built on the universal assessment to provide an approach to positioning based on the level of acceptance or rejection. This work is constructed under the perspective of Moscovici's Theory of Social Representations, and under a structural focus parting from the methodological position aimed at determining the structure of a social representation, using the word association technique. Amongst the results, the confirmation of diverse social representations was found, some denoting a favorable posture towards the evaluation of the teacher’s performance, others reference the appropriation of the normative presentation, and one warns the processes used to implement the assessment are inadequate.