Philosophy of Evaluation In Education
Evaluation is based two philosophies one, traditional philosophy is that ability to learn is randomly distributed in the general population. It means that if some learning task is assigned to a class and then a test is administered to study their performance. The result of the test shows that some students’ score is very high and some students’ score is low and majority of the students, score falls between these two extremes. It was the opinion of old educators that all are not endowed with same intellectual abilities to benefit from schooling. Generally, teachers weeded out students who tended to learn less well than their peers. This was the old philosophy based on the superiority of heredity.
This gave birth to norm-referenced measurement of intellectual abilities. It has been used in schools to differentiate among individuals of some defined group or whatever is being measured, in norm-referenced measurement, an individual’s score is interpreted by comparing the score to those of a defined group, often called the normative group. The comparison is relative rather than absolute. The philosophy of measurement has recently emerged. The new philosophy of measurement is based on democratic values and gives importance to the environment. It is based on the universalization of education. It assumes that if education is thought universal, the responsibility of the teacher is to help as many students as possible to learn. It has discarded the selection philosophy of norm-referenced measurement. All individuals can attain mastery of a learning task, provided are given opportunities and time. It assumes that with property developed instructional sequence every child could reach 100 per cent mastery of any objective, it suggests that an absolute standard be used as reference for evaluation. These standards are the objectives specified for instruction. Each student’s status is determined by how he achieves and satisfies its objectives for example, before a unit begins, the teacher may have decided that three objectives were essential for every student. A student has to satisfy each in order to receive a passing grade.
Thus we see that the two philosophies of evaluation are based on different concepts of human potencies and their development, one believes that human abilities are not evenly distributed in the population. Achievement of individual learner differs greatly whereas the other believes that all learners can attain the mastery of learning task irrespective of individual differences among them.
