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> Design & Development > Defining the evaluation process
Defining the evaluation process
The various approaches to evaluation
Evaluation
in an educational context
Practical
models for carrying out evaluation
The various approaches
to evaluation
The evaluation literature
is extensive. You are not expected to read much of this literature
unless you going to become an expert.
The literature can be seen to be divided up into a number of groups:
The practical work in evaluation of training
The broader ranging work of the
program
evaluation groups
The theoretical work on validation from psychology and related
areas
The conceptual work found in educational, sociology and related
areas.
We shall use a
categorisation
developed by Worthen, Sanders & Fitzpatrick (1987) to provide
an explanatory framework that requires minimal theoretical background.
Evaluation in an educational
context
Evaluation in an educational is a subset of the general area of program
and project evaluation. It has its own context, its own specialist
thinking and its own literature. But none of this sets it apart in
a way that says educational evaluation thinking is needed
by those who are not educationalists.
All evaluators suffer from the problem of measuring the effectiveness
of a program. Educational evaluators often point to the need to define
the actual educational impact on the learning. The same thing is said
by trainers and those implementing social policy.
What we are saying is that you can read many of the evaluation areas
and what you read can be applied to your educational activities.
A practical model for
carrying out evaluation
When you work in a professional environment that has little specialised
knowledge of educational evaluation, a good strategy is to find the
other staff who are interested in evaluation. There will be skills
that can be traded to get things done. There will be a staff member
who knows something about analysis, someone will have been involved
in carrying out surveys and so on. Do some networking!
The best practical starting point for inexperienced evaluators is
the minimalist approach:
Collect a basic set of data that will help you
next time around.
We suggest that this can be done by simply asking students to answer
a couple of open-ended questions about what they got out of the course.
This will give you a basic feel for where to go next.
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