The paper “Who Evaluates Whom: Evaluation Literates Versus Evaluation Illiterates?” of Dr Lalit Kishore was accepted for a conference in South Africa in 2009, The abstract of which is given here.
ABSTRACT
Evaluation is now being recognized as quite a complex concept and process. Also, many educators have started realizing the emerging moral dilemmas associated with their evaluation practice. Evaluation is being described as a curious paradox that we are a society that has come to care very much about high standards but most of us are incapable of understanding whether those are being met. Educators and non-educators alike are not sufficiently literate in basics of evaluation. A study was conducted on as a part of a practicum project in the area of evaluation rated as A+ by specialists. By evolving four evaluation-literates and four evaluation-illiterates and using an evaluation format indicating three aspects having two criteria each for evaluation. The context of the study was the training programme on generic and practical aspects of evaluation with the mixed participants with and without the formal training in evaluation forming the evaluation-literate and evaluation-illiterate groups. These evaluators were the post-graduates with 10 to 15 years of teaching experience. The result showed that there was a significantly low (p<0.01; d.f. =2) rating for the practicum project by the evaluation-illiterates while no significant difference was not observed when scoring was done by the evaluation-literates. The implication of the study is that the evaluators need to be oriented, trained and certified for evaluation which is a higher level cognitive ability as held by Bloom’s taxonomy of learning objectives.
Keywords: Evaluation, evaluation literacy, cognitive abilities, certification.
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