Chapter 8 - Eisner

1. Chapter 8 - Eisner The functions and forms of evaluation

2. 5 important functions of evaluation • To • Diagnose • Revise curricula • Compare • Identifying educational needs • Determine if objectives have been achieved

3. Major subject matters of evaluation • Significance of content • Important to determine whether the content and tasks are within the scope • Experiential fitness of the content to the experiential background of students

4. Quality of Teaching • Evaluating the quality of teaching is easier to say than to do. • The need for quantification, for explanation, for replicability, and for generalization has often led to a highly reductionistic approach to the study of teaching • What is true? What counts as evidence? • If educational practitioners had to base their educational practices on hard data, we would have to close our schools.

5. Outcomes achieved • Outcome is a broader term than objective… objectives can be included in the outcomes • Student-Specific • Teacher-Specific • Subject-Specific • Not always the obvious: What has a student learned in my class or course that is not about what I have been teaching?

6. Is evaluation an art? • The problem of • communicating to some public about what has happened in the educational institution • making known what is weak and strong, • making known what needs support and what does not can be conceived as an artistic problem. • Put together an expressive, sensitive, and revealing picture of educational practice and consequences.