assessment and evaluation

Bill Penuel (bpenuel who-is-at unix.sri.com)
Fri, 26 Feb 1999 09:02:10 -0800

One understanding I take of the difference between assessment and
evaluation is the unit of analysis. Typically, individual students' or
groups of students' performance is _assessed_ with respect to a particular
task, while programs, schools, and other activity settings are the focus of
_evaluation_. Evaluation's purposes are often multiple: accountability,
program improvement, to sit on shelves....

People do of course talk about evaluation in psychological terms for
individuals, but I think that meaning is close to the kind of distinction
Eugene is making here between the two terms, namely that this involves a
normative judgment of the assessment results used to define a course of
"remediation."

I'm also leery of the distinction between assessment and evaluation
altogether, though I think the distinction as it has been used in the field
has practical significance closely related to our discussion of portfolio
assessment. Namely, that once assessments are used for evaluation purposes
by others in more powerful positions than they, they often are perceived by
teachers as much less useful for driving instruction and work with
individual students. (This is not to say assessment of students by
teachers is not characterized by the same kind of politics, though at a
different institutional level.)

Bill

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Bill Penuel, PhD
Research Social Scientist
Center for Technology in Learning
SRI International
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