EGED 131-Teaching Multigrade Handout #7

ASSESSMENT AND EVALUATION

When you have an experience, you may make judgements about it. You may make
judgements about the food you eat, whether it tasted good or bad, films that you saw
or a football team’s performance. In each case, you are evaluating a situation.

In a school, you are constantly involved in evaluation. You evaluate the

learners’ progress, and you evaluate the effectiveness of your teaching.

This unit will introduce you to the skills needed to conduct effective
assessments and evaluations in your multigrade classroom.

What Are Assessment and Evaluation?

Assessment
What do you think when you observe your friend riding a bicycle without falling off?
Maybe you think, “He didn’t fall off this time!” This is assessing even if you did not
give him a mark. Whenever you observe an event and make a judgement about its
status or success, you are assessing. Therefore, assessment refers to the collecting of
information about the learner to find out how well the learner is performing. When
assessing, the learner is judged on his or her own performance over a period of time.
The learner is not necessarily compared with other learners.

Evaluation
Evaluation is the process by which a teacher measures the performance of the learners
and himself or herself in order to determine what has been accomplished. Evaluation
describes the learners’ performance based on additional factors such as:
 the expectations regarding particular learners,
 their present performance compared with their past
performances, and
 how well particular learners perform compared with the
rest of the class.

So, evaluation is the judgment made about a learner’s performance and is based on a
number of factors, including how well a learner has done when compared to other
learners.

Introductory Activity 2
Mr Owen gave an English test to his class and awarded marks to each learner.
Mr Owen noticed that Otilia had scored 70% on the test. He described Otilia’s
performance as ‘just satisfactory’.

What did Mr Owen do? Why did he describe Otilia’s performance in such a
way?

When Should You Conduct Assessments and Evaluations?

You can use assessments and evaluations in a number of situations, such as those
described below.
*Before a new topic is introduced in order to determine what experiences or
understanding the learners already have about that topic. This information will help
you decide what new information they need to be taught.
*During an individual lesson. You may want to find out if the learners understand and
are learning the concepts being taught. If you note problems, you may be able to help
your learners overcome them.
*At the end of a topic, a term or the school year. You want to know if your
learners have successfully achieved the programme objectives.
Why Evaluate?
The main purposes served by assessment and evaluation in the school
situation are listed below.
*Assessment and evaluation are very important tools for a multigrade teacher:
-They provide you with knowledge about how effective your teaching has
been.
-Evaluation helps you to make decisions about what to teach and how to
teach.
-They help you to manage and organize your classroom, schedule your
subjects, plan and map out your teaching strategies and decide on suitable
instructional resources.
*Assessments and evaluations help the learners.
Remember when you were a learner and were given a test. Do you remember
what the results revealed to you? Perhaps the results:
-helped you to realize how much you knew or did not know,
-indicated how much you needed to study, or
-indicated what the teacher expected you to know.

Carefully planned and timed assessments and evaluations can provide useful feedback
to the learners about their strengths and weaknesses. Thus, learners are encouraged
to develop good study habits that will help them to become self-directed learners.
Helping students to learn how to learn is one of the aims of multigrade teaching.
*Assessments and evaluations are important to the school administration.
They play a crucial role in providing school administrators with information for
making decisions about learners. For example, administrators need information that
will help them determine where to place learners and in which subjects they
demonstrate the greatest aptitude. Assessments and evaluations may also point to
the need for remedial classes. If need be, school administrators can also identify areas
in the school programme that are strong or weak and where action should be taken.
*Evaluation and assessment provide important information for
parents.
Results from classroom tests are important sources of information for parents. This
information helps parents monitor their children’s progress and therefore make
informed decisions about their children’s progress in a class or a school. As a
multigrade teacher, make sure that the results parents receive are timely, accurate and
reflective of the child’s performance.

What Do You Assess and Evaluate?

Evaluation and assessment in schools should focus on cognitive, psychomotor
and affective outcomes. These outcomes are explained below.
Cognitive Outcomes
Look at the two objectives below:
 Learners should be able to calculate correctly.
 Learners should be able to identify colours.

What do you notice? Do you realise that they both deal with thinking or cognitive skills?
The learners are expected to calculate correctly and identify colours. These are called
cognitive outcomes.

Affective Outcomes
As a multigrade teacher, try to observe and describe other aspects of the learners’
development such as the learners’ willingness to:
 assist in doing classroom tasks,
 share resources with friends, and
 organise their own work.

These outcomes which deal with the attitudes are known as affective outcomes.
Frequently, these outcomes are not measured, yet they are probably the most
important outcomes. You want your students to develop a positive view about
themselves and about learning. You want them to be independent learners yet be able
to socialise with others. All these are affective outcomes.

Psychomotor Outcomes
Examples of psychomotor outcomes to be assessed and evaluated are:
 measuring lengths,
 drawing, and
 constructing a model.

When assessing or evaluating psychomotor outcomes, include the evaluation and

assessment of cognitive ones as well. For example, learners cannot measure the length
of a table unless they can read a ruler and distinguish between centimetres and
millimetres.

How Do You Evaluate?

Consider ways in which you as a multigrade teacher may need to collect information to
decide on your learners’ progress.

Did you think of any of the following ways for collecting information for learner
assessment and evaluation?
 Giving tests
 Observing and using checklists
 Listening
 Participating in learner activities
 Reading the learners’ written work.

One of the above, giving tests, is discussed below.

Giving Tests
A test is a device or tool used to provide data for assessment and evaluation purposes.
Tests are usually made up of a uniform set of tasks to be completed by all members of
a class or group. As a teacher, through questions and exercises, you should give
learners the opportunity to show what tasks they can do and how well they can do
them.

Below are a number of purposes that tests can serve in your classroom situation. Tests
can:
 provide information on how well students have mastered
content or skills,
 measure a learner’s growth,
 diagnose difficulties which learners have in learning
materials,
 encourage learners to develop good study habits,
 motivate learners, and
 provide the teacher with feedback as to how effective his
or her teaching has been.

Types of Tests
There are two main types of tests. Each is described below.

Objective Tests. These tests usually require the learner to answer with a
single word, phrase or symbol. The learner obtains the same mark regardless
of the person marking. Examples of objective tests are:
 true and false. Learners are asked to decide and
indicate whether a statement is true or
false.
 multiple-choice. Learners must choose the correct
answer from given distracters
(incorrect answers).
 matching. Learners must demonstrate a relationship
between words.
 gap filling. Spaces are left blank between words in a
sentence or paragraph. The learner must
insert the missing word or words. Gap
filling can be useful for testing knowledge
of facts.

Subjective or Essay-Type Tests. In these types of tests, learners have almost total
freedom with regard to the content used to respond to the question. These are also
called extended response questions. In some cases, instead of writing a response,
students provide a verbal response.

In structured response essay questions, the learners’ responses are limited because the
structure within which the answer is to be given is clearly stated. Both extended and
structured response categories of essay-type questions are useful for testing outcomes
such as comprehension, application and analysis.
As a multigrade teacher, you must have available a wide range of methods from which
you can select to assess your learners’ different performances.

Checklists
A checklist is used during the observation of the learners’ behaviour. It is a list of
learner activities and behaviours, which you can use to indicate whether those
activities have been completed or whether specific behaviours have been exhibited.
Checklists are useful to both the learner and the teacher. You can use the data
collected from checklists to help you plan activities that would meet the needs of
individual students or groups of students.

Checklists can be used to:

 keep track of what learners are doing.
 give learners a clear idea about what is expected of
them.
You will find this observational tool important in your multigrade situation. It
will help you keep track of several groups, often at the same time.

Below is an example of a checklist on reading. You could use it to keep track of

each learner’s progress in reading.

Reading Task Completion Checklist

Grade 3 Date: 99-11-03

Name of Student …………John Singh …………..

Skill Area ….Visual and Auditory Discrimination

YES NO

 Distinguishes between letters seen. √

 Distinguishes between letters and words. √

 Distinguishes between letters heard. √

 Distinguishes between words heard. √

Source:Adapted from Commonwealth Secretariat, Caribbean Community Secretariat and

Commonwealth of Learning. (1998). Multigrade Teaching Programme.Module 8: Measurement and
Evaluation. London: Commonwealth Secretariat.

Pencil and paper tests, checklists and rating scales provide you with a quantitative
assessment of a learner’s progress. That is to say, a score is often given to indicate
how well the student has done.

Other Observational Tools

In addition to checklists, there are other observational tools that you can use to assess
learners. These tools are qualitative in nature, meaning they show when, how and
under what circumstances individual learners learn best.

Some of these observational tools are briefly described below.

One total records. These are records that give short accounts of the learners’
performances and behaviour over a period of time.
Example

Date: ………… Student’s name ……………………………… Grade:

……

Shana volunteered to read aloud in class today. She also

borrowed a book from the library for the first time.

Source: Commonwealth Secretariat, Caribbean Community Secretariat and Commonwealth of Learning.

(1998: 84). Multigrade Teaching Programme. Module 8: Measurement and Evaluation. London:
Commonwealth Secretariat.

Teachers’ journals. In these journals, teachers record what was taught

for a period of time.
Learners’ journals. These contain the learners’ record of ideas and
comments on classroom experiences.

Example
JOURNAL ENTRY (Student)
Date: September 20, 1998

We begin to learn about fish today in Science. Our teacher

said we will learn how they breathe and how they are
important to us. I am very excited about this unit, because I
live close to the water and I want to learn about them.

Amanda Smith 10
Grade 4

JOURNAL ENTRY (Teacher)

Date: September 20, 1998

I began the unit of FISH today. I plan to teach the students

that they live their entire life in water, they reproduce by
eggs, they breathe by means of gills, they are covered in
scales and they are valuable to us as food, bait, pets and for
tourist activities.

When I pre-tested children on this unit by discussing it with

them, I found that they did not have much actual knowledge
about fish anatomy. However, they all had fishing tales to tell
and they seemed quite excited about the unit.

Mrs Susan Jones

Teacher
 Source: Commonwealth Secretariat, Caribbean Community Secretariat
and Commonwealth of Learning. (1998: 92). Multigrade
Teaching Programme. Module 8: Measurement and
Evaluation. London: Commonwealth Secretariat.

Learner portfolio. This consists of samples of learners’ work. Each portfolio is collected for
a specific reason.

The above tools are very useful for collecting information about learner progress. They help
you as a teacher to understand what your learners are capable of doing and the conditions
under which they perform at their best. If information is collected and collated on a regular
basis, they can provide you with a good means of learner assessment and evaluation.

As stated earlier, the assessment and evaluation of learners provide useful and very
important information to parents, learners, the school administration and teachers. This
cannot be possible if the results of your assessment and evaluation are not recorded and
reported to them in an appropriate and timely manner. Now, let us look at record keeping.

Record Keeping
Have you ever considered why you keep records of your learners? Record keeping is
important for several reasons. By keeping records, you are able to:
 plan your teaching more effectively,
 assign appropriate tasks to students,
 help in guidance and counselling, and
 assist parents in monitoring their children’s progress.

Remember that the records you keep should be compiled in such a way that you can easily
identify areas of strengths and weaknesses in learners’ performances and thus make
modifications to their programmes. These records should also be used for producing long-
term records for the school.

Reporting
Reporting is very important in the assessment and evaluation process. It is essential that you
report to all necessary people, like guardians or parents, about the way the learner has
demonstrated competence in a particular area.

Most schools have standardised ways of reporting to parents about their children’s
performance. It may be a booklet or report card in which grades are recorded. In addition,
the teacher and head teacher usually make comments on otheraspects of behaviour such as
the learner’s conduct in school and on the playground.

You should find ways of reporting to parents that will not create additional strain on
you. In order to reduce strain, keep up-to-date and accurate records of your learners’
behaviours.