How to Teach Evaluation Skills

Evaluation is a skill that every American will need in life.

Evaluation is a skill that every American will need at some point in his or her educational and professional life. Not only will you likely need to evaluate yourself or someone else at some point in your life, but you will also likely need to know how to respond to an evaluation of your work. Knowing the rudiments of a good evaluation is a skill that every child should be taught while still in school. Teachers need to teach students not only how to produce good work, but how to produce a professional and fair evaluation of another's work.

Things You'll Need

• Objects to evaluate (writing, etc.)
• Students

Instructions

1. Tailor your evaluation lessons to the specific subject that you are teaching. In the U.S., if you are teaching anything past elementary school, you are teaching a specific subject rather than a general classroom. If you are teaching writing, for example, your students will need a good grounding in how to write a quality paper before they can evaluate someone else's writing.

2. Teach your students the rudiments of a good evaluation before you let them practice their skills. Evaluation is a purely professional skill; thus, if your students are evaluating a piece of writing, their critiques should be kept to things like spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and strength of argument. Disagreement with an argument is valid, but personal attacks on the writer are never a qualified part of an evaluation.

3. Start by using the work of a third party as a target for evaluation. Present an editorial from a newspaper, perhaps, or even a blog post that you find matches the intellectual level of the classroom.

4. Ask the students to pick out the most important elements of the work that they are evaluating. If the subject is a paper, is there a clear thesis? Are there supporting arguments, qualified by evidence? Is there a smooth transition between ideas and are all of the writer's ideas tied together concisely at the end of the piece?

5. Allow students to critique each other's work once they become comfortable evaluating the work of a third party.

Tips & Warnings

• Writing is perhaps the best subject of evaluation when training students. Writing must be inherently logical and it must include very specific tenets. It also demands that a writer express himself or herself, often in a very personal way. Writing demands the whole person and thus, when evaluating writing, students will be evaluating the art of self-expression. This will prepare any student to evaluate any other work in life.

• Students need to be taught that a fair evaluation says nothing of a person's personality; that is, that it is unfair to discriminate against personality types and that an evaluation should apply only to the work that a person produces.

References

• University of California at Berkeley: Office of Educational Development: Collaborative Learning: Group Work and Study Teams
• University of Tennessee at Chattanooga: Walker Teaching Resource Center: Evaluating Groups Fairly