Why evaluate learning?

 

So when pondering the question "Why do teachers evaluate learning" we have to ask ourselves, what would be the benefit of evaluating what we learn. The following blog is a personal opinion regarding the subject.

When we talk about evaluation, we have to take into consideration our methods, this means how materials are presented, the types of learning tasks used, and the way we design our courses. In my opinion, we have to be creative since a class requires us as teachers to learn different methods of teaching, the same way the student learns in different ways. It is convenient then, to know different methods of evaluation in a classroom, and as teachers we should know how to evaluate this in a creative way.

When we evaluate different aspects of the teaching and learning process it becomes important to make explicit the criteria used in our judgments and to be principled in our evaluations Rea-Dickins, P., & Germaine, K. (1992). Evaluation in the Teaching and Learning Process: Making Explicit Criteria. (pp. 4-5). in retrospect, we need to make sure that the criteria we are evaluating takes into consideration the most important parts of the lesson.

Lesson planning plays then a very important role of the evaluation, the establishment of objectives, and the definition of objectives, purposes and strategies of the lesson, so defining the goals will helps us get the date collection, for according to Garcia Ramos, (1989). Evaluation in Education: Identifying, Collecting, and Processing Data. (p. 122). the evaluation is a systematic process of Identifying collecting, and processing data about elements and educational facts with the aim of assessing them first, and making decisions about said assessment.

We have different levels of evaluation:

1.       We have evaluation at the technical level, this means that the evaluation is aimed at verifying whether the educational system is fulfilling its goals or not.

2.       We have the ideological evaluation, this is done to legitimize the cultural heritage and to assess if an individual belongs or not on a social class

3.       We also have the Psychopedagogical that is most commonly applied to specific students.

 

So how do we transform the knowledge, all the learnt information into something tangible so the students can prove the information stayed? With evaluations, with tests, grading their knowledge allows us as teachers to comprehend that the delivery method of the lesson was effective. Although in my opinion we have to take into consideration that not all students learn the same way, this means that for a student with the diagnose of ADHD, the type of test we apply must be adequate to their skills, this means that the information might be there, but the student might not be very good at concentrating on a written exam which may fail, on this case we need to evaluate them differently than everyone else.  I think learning should be a two way process, since we can evaluate a student, but as far as my experience goes, the student also evaluates the teacher and how the material is delivered.

 

We have seen from time to time that learning process is not easy for everyone, evaluating isn’t easy either, for there are many things to consider. One of the things we need to consider is that evaluation has two sides, the quantitative and the qualitative. On regards of the quantitative is referred to numbers or grades like 1.2.3.4….100. The qualitative refers more to the quality of the grade like excellent, good, great, fair, poor etc.  I think that as a pre-school teacher this applies more to the qualitative way of providing grades, depending of the child’s learning level we can assess like this, excellent, good etc, evaluation as I said before comes in make forms or shapes, for example a university student may not be okay with a smiley face sticker, a 2 year old would be thrilled to have a sticker and will probably encourage him/her to do it better or keep doing it better. For a university student the quantitative part of the evaluation is more suitable, this can be done using numbers or letters, for example A,B,C,D etc…

In my perspective, evaluation is the most important part of the class for it allows us as teachers to assess whether a student needs a little bit more of attention than others and we can work towards changing or modifying the lesson delivery method, one thing goes with the other in a mutualism relationship. Thank you for reading!

Vanessa Severino