Still about evaluation

I borrowed the picture from http://remixingcollegeenglish.wordpress.com/category/assessment/

In my previous post, assessment is extremely important to guide us into the curriculum: assessment is meant to improve the learning and the teaching process. Assessments FOR, AS and OF learning are the basics for gathering, analyzing and reflecting on evidence to make informed and consistent judgments to improve future student learning.
We know there are different methods of evaluation. It depends how large group you have and how long time and most of all what do you want to know. Evaluation which is done before the course is called formative evaluation. This evaluation is meant to aim at eliciting comments from the students for the instructor to make corrections to the course. I usually do formative evaluations in my job too. Before starting a class I use the GIVE - GET - AVOID questions in order to have an idea what the students expect to get from the course. Summative evaluation is done at the end of the course. It is useful for the next implementation of the same course and can provide the instructor information about the specific areas needing improvement. I usually use the summative evaluation to all my courses. Normally the Community College gives me a form which the students fill up. I evaluate also in my own way, using the ideas from  Training Tool Box from the Salto net page.

On this century one good method is of course a blog. Evaluation of teaching is required to help the instructor to improve the course, compare instructors, reward or punish the instructor or inform the potential students. Improvement on teaching without feedback is impossible.
But does the form(at) of assessment really matter? John Biggs in his Assessing for Learning quality: II Practice, says that "It´s important for a teacher to identify the learning goals, the objectives, the methods and he/she should be able to reflect on them." Assessment in learning is a diagnostic tool to find out learner´s strengths and weaknesses and needs to maintain standards (even thought is not always possible because the students’ backgrounds vary) and finally it provides evidence of learner´s progress. In Vet it is difficult to assess competences and it´s also hard to divide them into smaller and different categories. The assessment in this century should be stay on quality: it should fit to the purpose, need a strategic approach. On the light of this consideration my question is: Is it even possible to keep an high quality of assessment?
In  Edutopia there is a good explanation about assessment: you cannot assess students with paper and pen you need to have performance based assessment because the project requires these students to create products or performances. Portfolio in this century is very useful for us. It provides us certification purpose, formative purpose and documentation purpose; with it you can evaluate the final performances, the process, the strategies used and the progress during the process.



References:

• C. Wankat, S. Oreovicz Teaching Engineering, Mcgraw-Hill College | ISBN: 0070681546 | 1992-11 retrieved on   http://ebookee.org/Teaching-Engineering-Phillip-C-Wankat-Frank-S-Oreovicz_318753.html#GBHj47gqe0Fi56XF.99 
• Jarvis P. Adult Education and life long learning, Routledge, 01/ago/2004. Retrieved on http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Adult_Education_and_Lifelong_Learning.html?id=vdtF-pk_6OUC