Formative evaluation of teacher educators & their development is pivotal to quality education: Study

"Quality of education solely depends on the quality of teacher educators who are required to the harbinger of transformation and examples of right kind of classroom processes for learning to take place. A teacher educator under his guidance and with mastery over learning, teaching and evaluation techniques can develop the right kind of teachers under his guidance and mentoring," said Dr Lalit Kishore of Jaipur who paper was accepted for an international conference (Kenton Conference) in 2008 at University of the Witwatersrand in south Africa (SA).

The conference was organized to learn the lessons from the educational researches to charter the new path after 350 years of formal education in SA. Dr Kishore's paper "WHO EVALUATES WHOM: EVALUATION LITERATES VERSUS EVALUATION ILLITERATES?" was accepted for the conference which emphasized evaluation reforms with emphasis on formative evaluation of teacher educators as pivotal educational functionaries.

Here is the abstract of his paper

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.

Also, the abstract of his paper “Setting the ball rolling: Development of a scientific and technological literacy curriculum guide for single-teacher multi-age girls’ elementary schools” which emphasized the process based learning of science to build the quality in classroom instruction, was accepted for presentation at EASA/KENTON 2006 CONFERENCE -2006 in SA.