Educational evaluation

Educational evaluation is the evaluation process of characterizing and appraising some aspect/s of an educational process.

There are two common purposes in educational evaluation which are, at times, in conflict with one another. Educational institutions usually require evaluation data to demonstrate effectiveness to funders and other stakeholders, and to provide a measure of performance for marketing purposes. Educational evaluation is also a professional activity that individual educators need to undertake if they intend to continuously review and enhance the learning they are endeavoring to facilitate.

Purpose for educational evaluation

The Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation published three sets of standards for educational evaluations. The Personnel Evaluation Standards was published in 1988, The Program Evaluation Standards (2nd edition) was published in 1994, and The Student Evaluations Standards was published in 2003.

Each publication presents and elaborates a set of standards for use in a variety of educational settings. The standards provide guidelines for designing, implementing, assessing and improving the identified form of evaluation. Each of the standards has been placed in one of four fundamental categories to promote evaluations that are proper, useful, feasible, and accurate.

The Personnel Evaluation Standards

• The propriety standards require that evaluations be conducted legally, ethically, and with due regard for the welfare of evaluatees and clients involved.
• The utility standards are intended to guide evaluations so that they will be informative, timely, and influential.
• The feasibility standards call for evaluation systems that are as easy to implement as possible, efficient in their use of time and resources, adequately funded, and viable from a number of other standpoints.
• The accuracy standards require that the obtained information be technically accurate and that conclusions be linked logically to the data.

The Program Evaluation Standards

• The utility standards are intended to ensure that an evaluation will serve the information needs of intended users.
• The feasibility standards are intended to ensure that an evaluation will be realistic, prudent, diplomatic, and frugal.
• The propriety standards are intended to ensure that an evaluation will be conducted legally, ethically, and with due regard for the welfare of those involved in the evaluation, as well as those affected by its results.
• The accuracy standards are intended to ensure that an evaluation will reveal and convey technically adequate information about the features that determine worth or merit of the program being evaluated.

The Student Evaluation Standards

• The Propriety standards help and ensure that student evaluations are conducted lawfully, ethically, and with regard to the rights of students and other persons affected by student evaluation.
• The Utility standards promote the design and implementation of informative, timely, and useful student evaluations.
• The Feasibility standards help ensure that student evaluations are practical; viable; cost-effective; and culturally, socially, and politically appropriate.
• The Accuracy standards help ensure that student evaluations will provide sound, accurate, and credible information about student learning and performance.

Criticism of educational evaluation

Evaluation in a democratic school

Sudbury model of democratic education schools do not perform and do not offer evaluations, assessments, transcripts, or recommendations, asserting that they do not rate people, and that school is not a judge; comparing students to each other, or to some standard that has been set is for them a violation of the student's right to privacy and to self-determination. Students decide for themselves how to measure their progress as self-starting learners as a process of self-evaluation: real lifelong learning and the proper educational evaluation for the 21st Century, they adduce.^[1]

According to Sudbury schools( Riaz Institute of education and research.)..., this policy does not cause harm to their students as they move on to life outside the school. However, they admit it makes the process more difficult, but that such hardship is part of the students learning to make their own way, set their own standards and meet their own goals.

The no-grading and no-rating policy helps to create an atmosphere free of competition among students or battles for adult approval, and encourages a positive co-operative environment amongst the student body.^[2]

The final stage of a Sudbury education, should the student choose to take it, is the graduation thesis. Each student writes on the topic of how they have prepared themselves for adulthood and entering the community at large. This thesis is submitted to the Assembly, who reviews it. The final stage of the thesis process is an oral defense given by the student in which they open the floor for questions, challenges and comments from all Assembly members. At the end, the Assembly votes by secret ballot on whether or not to award a diploma.^[3]

See also

• Alternative assessment
• Classroom walkthrough
• Competency evaluation
• Criterion-referenced test
• Design Focused Evaluation
• Evaluation methods and techniques
• Grading
• Knowledge survey
• Norm-referenced test
• Performance evaluation
• Program evaluation
• Standardized testing
• Standardized testing and public policy
• Teacher quality assessment
• Washington County Closed-Circuit Educational Television Project

Notes

1. ^ Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation. (1988). The Personnel Evaluation Standards: How to Assess Systems for Evaluating Educators. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.
2. ^ Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation. (1994). The Program Evaluation Standards, 2nd Edition. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.
3. ^ Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation. (2003). The Student Evaluation Standards: How to Improve Evaluations of Students. Newbury Park, CA: Corwin Press.

References

1. Greenberg, D. (2000). 21st Century Schools, edited transcript of a talk delivered at the April 2000 International Conference on Learning in the 21st Century.
2. Greenberg, D. (1987). Chapter 20, Evaluation, Free at Last — The Sudbury Valley School.
3. Graduation Thesis Procedure, Mountain Laurel Sudbury School.

External links

• OECD's Education GPS: a review of education policy analysis and statistics. Policy analysis in evaluation and quality assurance

• American Evaluation Association
  • Topical interest groups (TIGs)
    • Assessment in Higher Education
    • Distance Education and Other Educational Technologies
    • Extension Education Evaluation
    • Graduate Student and New Evaluators
    • PreK-12 Educational Evaluation
    • Teaching of Evaluation
• American Educational Research Association
  • Division H School Evaluation & Program Development
  • Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing
• Assessment in Higher Education web site.
• Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation
• The EvaluationWiki - The mission of EvaluationWiki is to make freely available a compendium of up-to-date information and resources to everyone involved in the science and practice of evaluation. The EvaluationWiki is presented by the non-profit Evaluation Resource Institute.
• Wisconsin Center for Education Research