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How do you ensure that evaluation is a positive experience for you students?
 | Kim Anic,
Psychologist, Headmaster of Elementary School “KOZALA,” Rijeka, Croatia. |
When we define certain educational tasks and goals, it is not enough to use vague terms such as know, learn, and understand, because “if we don’t know where we are going, we could get lost.” Different types of learning demand different skills, different teaching strategies, and different methods of evaluation. If the terms we use to define our goals aren’t precise enough, it is hard to know how to evaluate learning outcomes. We need to evaluate critical thinking skills like comparison and analysis, instead of just focusing on rote memorization and facts. When we wish to model positive evaluation skills for our students, our goals should be to compare, to conclude, to distinguish, to criticize, to discriminate, to explain, to judge, to evaluate, to justify, to interpret, and to back up our conclusions with facts and reasoning.
When we expose students to critical thinking and evaluation, we increase their ability to evaluate themselves and their own performance, which is an important skill set that can help them achieve personal and academic success. Developing self-evaluation skills can also help make external evaluations less stressful, as students realize that their teachers do not have a perfect or objective knowledge of the students’ own learning. Self-evaluation helps students gain insight into topics that might otherwise be beyond their grasp; it also helps them not only make decisions, but also take responsibility for those decisions. There are many different ways for students to perform self-evaluations, such as checklists, numerical scales, written overviews of what they think they have learned, interviews, and focus groups. When we engage in peer evaluation and self-evaluation, we need to keep in mind certain basic principles: The evaluation criteria must be consistent with stated goals; evaluation must be part of the learning process; many different methods of evaluation are necessary to gain an accurate and complete picture of progress; and evaluation must always address the learning process as well as the end results. These same basic principles should also be applied by teachers who are evaluating their students’ learning. Teachers who are trying to model critical thinking and evaluation for their students should bear the following recommendations in mind:
- Don’t just consider arbitrary standards, but also consider a topic’s relevance to citizens in a democratic society.
- Evaluate group, as well as individual, performance.
- Include a broad range of students’ abilities and interests (painting, writing, music, nature, etc.)
- Reward constructive participation and the desire to achieve results, not just the results themselves.
- Make use of self-evaluations, and peer evaluations from other students.
- Encourage cooperative study, positive interdependence, and individual responsibility for learning.
Teachers who are skilled at evaluation and critical thinking help themselves as well as their students, because they can use the feedback of their colleagues and mentors to improve themselves personally and professionally.
Using these skills in my everyday work, I have noticed better cooperation among my students, better performance on their activities, and a better attitude towards taking responsibility for their performance. Students and parents also seem to have a better understanding of the grades I give, and are better at evaluating their own performance and engaging in constructive self-criticism.
 | Serafima Bakhareva,
Professional Development Institute for Educators, Novosibirsk, Russia. |
I believe that experience is the crucial word to consider here. In the process of evaluation students can acquire important and necessary insights into their learning—but evaluation is most constructive if the experience is positive. Schools evaluate students all the time: their written work, their oral responses, their behavior, their appearance, etc. Students also evaluate themselves and other students. They are always evaluating their own work and the work of others; their own behavior and
other people’s behavior; various teaching and life situations, etc. — even if nobody is interested in their opinion. By doing so they learn to compare, analyze, assess, and exercise judgment. They learn to understand concepts of better and worse; appropriate and inappropriate; fair and unfair; honest and dishonest. This experience helps them to interpret the marks and grades they receive at school, and understand why they received these grades.
As an elementary school teacher, I want to familiarize children with the process of evaluation, and help them to apply that knowledge productively to support their own learning. Aware of the value of this experience, I constantly seek ways to use it in my classes.
It is interesting and useful for students to observe how several of their classmates perform the same task. It doesn’t matter what they are doing—adding numbers, writing words, composing a phrase or a sentence, analyzing the phonetic composition of words. And it doesn’t need to take a lot of time.
For example: Five students go to the blackboard and write words in a column When they have finished, they return to their seats, and the results remain on the blackboard. Now everybody has an opportunity to compare and evaluate. Together, we correct mistakes when we see them (sometimes the person who made them sees them first!). Then we analyze which mistakes were repeated, and what needs to be taken into account next time. We look at the writing and assess which is more attractive to look at (neat writing), which is easier to read (legible handwriting), etc.
The work that, from various points of view, is determined to be the best may be left on the blackboard as an example for some time. Sometimes none of the work warrants this honor; and other times it is difficult to choose the best because they are all wonderful! Needless to say, when the process of evaluation is so public, it is crucially important to emphasize that it is the work that is being evaluated, not the students themselves!
You don’t need to give definite grades in this case. Children often forget about formal grades and don’t even ask, “What did I get for it?” Each student can see his or her own work and assess it; being able to directly compare their work with that of others doing the same task makes this easier and more concrete. And every child can draw his or her own conclusions about how well the work was done. Children are fair by nature, and they often understand much more than we grownups realize.
It is interesting that in such “group” work the evaluation by the teacher and other students practically always coincides with the self-evaluation. When the child realizes that his or her work is being evaluated objectively and fairly, he or she hardly ever takes offence. It is important to make clear both the expectations for the task and the criteria used in evaluation. It is also important that poorly done work be acknowledged as poorly done—and that the student be shown what is needed to improve it. By making evaluation a positive experience, by opening it up and involving students in the evaluative process, we can provide them with invaluable experience that will inform and positively motivate them, and contribute to their learning.
 | Jun-min Kuo,
Assistant Professor of English, Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, Tunghai University, Taiwan. |
My students in Taiwan are all university students, i.e. students who are no longer senior high students and who therefore are studying English for their own enrichment, not just to prepare for standardized testing. This transition, or perhaps I should say “privilege,” allows me to assess my students’ performance while working from the assumption that there are no “wrong” answers. This belief motivates me to construct comfortable spaces, where students can critically and creatively reflect on various print and/or non-print texts. For example, in the first week of the semester, students are asked to introduce themselves individually both in the classroom and on a weblog. They may work in pairs one week, and perform an original four-minute dialogue in class another week. They may listen to a love song and respond by revising its lyrics into a version of their own that might depict their personal experience. During the second semester, they may perform a group play with six or seven roles, on a topic related to their own lives. Sometimes I have students watch a film clip, discuss any topics they can identify in the clip, and relate the topics to real stories that they find in local newspapers. They may also read a poem or a picture book and talk about it. The ideas shown in students’ performances mainly come from students themselves and their lives. This ensures that evaluation is a positive, rather than a negative, experience.
 | Rafael Madoyan,
School 177, Yerevan, Armenia. |
 | Lyudmila Arushanyan,
National Education Institute, Yerevan, Armenia. |
One of the most difficult pedagogical tasks is to ensure that evaluation exerts a positive influence upon the process of teaching. The cult of high grades, which currently dominates school life, too often results in the situation where students and parents resort to swotting, cheating, and even “making deals” to achieve the desired goal of high grades. In order to change this situation we should work to eliminate the negative aspects of our current approach to evaluation. The following principles provide sound guidance here.
- It is necessary to provide for fair evaluation, both by eliminating the potential for cheating through strict monitoring of exam sessions, and by involving impartial teachers in the composition and conduct of examinations and tests.
- Evaluation tasks should be individualized, and should require students to demonstrate analytical thinking and creative approaches.
- The process of evaluation should be ongoing and should play a formative role. It should be a part of the teaching process, rather than simply the conclusion to it.
- Priority should be given to the acquisition of knowledge and skills, rather than grades or test scores. This emphasis should be clearly communicated to both students and parents.
The achievement of this last goal is not limited to school life, as it involves the values of society as a whole. Numerous external factors, including knowledge requirements for future career success and entrance requirements for institutions of higher learning, reinforce students’ obsession with grades. However, the first three points in the list refer to the responsibilities of the school, and it is our conviction that persistent efforts to implement them could have considerable impact. At our school we are taking certain steps in this direction.
When compiling final grades, the school administration gives priority to the scores received on school-wide tests, for which tasks are compiled by computer from an extensive database of questions and answers on all school subjects which is available at the school. Members of the school’s board of directors are required to be present during these tests. If teachers want to give a final (semester) grade that differs by one or more score units from a student’s results on the school test, they must justify their decision at a teachers’ meeting. Unlike the idealists who portray teachers as elevated beings, concerned only with communicating the joys of learning to their students, we believe that a teacher is an ordinary person, whose personal self-interests prevail. Consequently, we attempt to eliminate the potential for lack of objectivity by avoiding, wherever possible, reliance on subjective factors in evaluation.
The teachers’ professional skills are crucial to ensure that test tasks correspond to the evaluation goals. We believe that the positive impact of evaluation derives from the incentives it provides for students as they strive for better results on the basis of the objective evaluation of their performance. It is very important that the student be aware of his or her potential, his or her level of skills.
As for the actual methods used by our teachers in this process, we offer the following examples:
- Creation of student task groups charged with designing written tests for future classes. Involvement in such groups helps students gain insight into how they themselves should prepare for such tests. This technique has been used successfully to evaluate students’ knowledge of the theoretical issues of physics. Subsequent selfevaluation helps students become aware of inadequacies in their own test preparation strategies.
- Tasks are differentiated according to their difficulty and appropriateness for various grade levels. When students can independently select tasks of a certain difficulty level, it helps them to assess their preparedness and provides an incentive to select a more difficult task at the next test. We have used this effectively with exercises in physics and mathematics.
In Armenia, both reform-minded teachers and education administrators are increasingly aware of the need to make evaluation a positive experience. During the current academic year, a new form of evaluation is being implemented that includes two types of grades: a numerical grade and an evaluative comment. The numerical grade sums up marks awarded over the course of a term or semester, and is used to calculate final grades. The second type of evaluation is to be of a continuous and formative nature, and will be based on performance of oral, written, and practical tasks, including homework assignments. There is no final version of it yet. This initiative is an experimental project of the National Education Institute; our school is involved in developing this approach to evaluation, and our teachers have been asked to find the best methods to implement it. Without providing any details, I would like to cite the following remarkable developments by our teachers:
- The provision of a separate section in the class register for formative evaluation, where teachers can enter their observations and analyses of the student’s performance for every subject taught;
- The use of a thick logbook for each student that covers every school subject studied. All written work performed in class and at home is recorded in this book, along with the teacher’s comments and evaluation of it;
- The compilation of a portfolio for each student;
- The use of a computer grade log for each student, into which the teacher enters all the above mentioned observations and informative evaluations. Password protected Internet access makes it possible for both students and their parents to follow the progress of the student.
The first four months of the experiment have revealed that the effectiveness of these initiatives is more a consequence of the professional qualities and scrupulous work of the teacher than the specific form of teaching favored by that teacher. This kind of work demands considerable time and effort: Individual observations, evaluations, and notes must be made on many students, practically every day. It should be noted that most of our teachers are not accustomed to this way of evaluating their students, and many are not ready for it. Although efficient and effective teaching requires continuous concentration upon the needs of every student, teachers need to realistically take into account their own personality and teaching style when preparing for class work, when conducting class work, and when assessing students’ performance. The all-subject student logbook and the computer log seem to be the most practical and feasible of the new tools introduced. The student logbook is always available, parents have access to it, and it provides a clear picture of the work performed and the teacher’s comments on that work. It allows for an easy comparison between what students report about their progress and the actual written work they produce; the dynamics of the teaching process are made obvious. As for the computer log, it is a comprehensive database that contains a rich cross-section of information about the student. This log also provides extensive opportunities for teachers to make timely analyses of individual and group results.
In conclusion, we would like to remark that teaching is both a craft and an art. By strategically combining creative approaches, and drawing upon the professional skills and knowledge of teachers, schools can make the evaluation process a much more positive and informative process for all involved—teachers, students, parents, and administrators alike.
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How do you ensure that evaluation is a positive experience for your students?