How to Teach Evaluation Techniques

Exam Evaluation

Every teacher needs to evaluate. Firstly, they need to evaluate themselves to work out if their classroom practices are producing the desired learning, and secondly, they need to evaluate students to ensure they in turn have learned from the lessons. There are numerous ways to self-evaluate and to evaluate students that are accepted in schools and the following is a brief discussion of these techniques.

Things You'll Need

• Students Classes Educational knowledge Lessons Exams

Instructions

Evaluation Types

1. Evaluate your own performance by examining the processes you have used in class. An astute teacher will instinctively know if the students are on task and learning in the classroom. To further facilitate self-evaluation a teacher can keep a journal in which they enter anecdotal evidences of events and developments in their classes. Asking a colleague to observe a class is another way to evaluate performance in the classroom.

2. Evaluate student performance formatively. As the name suggests a formative evaluation is the practice of testing the student in order to work out what they know and what they don't know. This technique will enable the teacher to address those areas which are lacking in the individual student and to tailor lessons accordingly.

3. Allow the students to evaluate themselves. This is a technique that you would not use in gathering grades for an end of course situation but it is an effective tool to show students where they need extra work or where they require help in understanding a task. In these tasks the teacher would of course check the student's self-evaluation rigorously or randomly, depending on the effectiveness of the strategy.

4. Let the students evaluate each other's work. Peer evaluation is a very effective tool and it lends itself to encouraging students to perform at a higher than usual level. Some students tend to not be overly concerned that their teachers see poorly done work, but they will become self-conscious if their peers are the ones doing the evaluation. Not only will they be encouraged to do their best, but students will often be stricter in their evaluations than the teacher.

5. Evaluate your end of course student achievements with summative evaluations. Summative evaluation is a summation of what the student has learned over a course. It can take the form of a multiple-choice exam, a written exam, an assignment, or a project. Multiple choice exams are evaluated by a score out of a total, but the other types of evaluations need to be evaluated by criteria sheets or rubrics. These rubrics set the standards that an evaluator looks for when grading a piece of assessment and can be provided up front to students so that they know what is expected.

References

• Essays
• Multiple Choice
• Short Answer Tests

Resources

• Self-Evaluation