The Nature and Purpose of Educational Evaluation
The purpose of educational evaluation is to make a judgment about the quality or worth of something an educational programme, worker performance or proficiency or students attainments. That is what we attempt to do when we evaluate students’ achievements, employees’ productivity, or prospective practitioners’ competencies, in each case the goal is not simply to describe what the students, employees or other personnel can do. Instead we seek answers to such questions as: How good is the level of achievement? How good is the performance? Have they learned enough? Is their work good enough? These are question of value that requires the exercise of judgment. To say simply that evaluation is the process of making value judgments understates the complexity and difficult of the effort required. Once it has been determined that evaluation is needed, the evaluator must” decide what kind of information is needed, how the information should be gathered, and how the information should be synthesized to support the outcome the value judgment. Thus educational evaluation is as concerned with information gathering as it with making decisions. In addition, the term is used to refer to the product or outcome of the process. That Is, we might, for example, submit our evaluation (the product) of public’s school performance to his parents, following our evaluation (the process) of his accomplishments. In this respect educational evaluation has a dual connotation.
