Evaluation and assessment: can they go hand in hand?
Diana Hicks

Diana Hicks looks at some differences between assessment and evaluation and suggests some practical classroom strategies to evaluate students.

New approaches in the curriculum bring with them words with slightly changed meanings. ‘Evaluation’ and ‘assessment’ are two examples of this changed vocabulary. Neither term is new to teachers or students but what has changed are the different strategies which can be used to make clearer distinctions between them.

Evaluation and assessment are often thought of as having the same meaning because they can sometimes be carried out by one event. However, each serves different purposes because assessment and evaluation are each concerned with different aspects of teaching and learning. We assess our students to establish ‘what’ and ‘how much’ they have learnt but we evaluate our students and they evaluate themselves to find out ‘how’ the learning process is developing.

Assessment without evaluation

The most straightforward example of assessment without evaluation is the end of year examinations where the grade indicates the ‘attainment’ or ‘achievement’ level of each student, which can be measured against the other students. The result is simply that students know whether they have passed or failed and teachers know who are the ‘good’, ‘average’ and ‘weak’ students.

Assessment with evaluation

However, in addition to end of year tests, during the course of a school year students may take smaller tests. Generally, the scores from these smaller tests (such as 6/10 or 62%) will give the teacher the rank order for the students in the class but will probably not tell the students where and why they are going wrong nor will it give them strategies to help them improve. Neither will the scores inform the teacher about how and why the students behaved in a certain way.

Some practical ideas for vocabulary tests in the school year

These smaller tests are ideal mechanisms to use to ‘observe effects in context’ – in other words, to build evaluation into assessment and move them away from being ‘attainment’ or ‘achievement’ tests to become, instead, ‘formative’ or ‘diagnostic’ tests. In this case evaluation is used to change or add different activities in order to improve progress before the final examination.

These short tests usually refer back to units recently covered in class and usually focus on grammar and vocabulary. Often they are ‘gap fill’ so the teacher or even students can mark them quickly. These provide quantitative feedback – they tell us how much the students have remembered but they do not tell us how they learnt it or which kinds of tasks the students found most useful to help them understand it. However, if the students are involved in evaluating the contents of the test, we can acquire qualitative feedback on the basis of which we can re-assess our teaching and testing behaviours. How can we do this?

Evaluation in vocabulary assessment: involving the students

First, all tests consist of ‘what’ and ‘how’: students usually know ‘what’ they will be tested on but they are probably not told ‘how’. We often underestimate the ‘how’: that is, the exercise type we choose may not be a factor taken into account when we design the test. Nevertheless, it is this ‘how’ of the test which can help us make our teaching and the students’ learning more effective. We can bring the students into the process of ‘how’ by, for example, telling them that there will be a vocabulary test and inviting them to think about what kind of exercise would test their knowledge. First, students can look at the kinds of vocabulary exercises they did in previous tests. If the vocabulary exercise in all the tests is always the same type it will be worth spending some time thinking about why this is the case.

Exercise types

If, however, there is a range of exercise types which test vocabulary, students can be asked to consider how successful they think each exercise type is: how much guesswork is involved in each exercise? what kind of guesswork? Guessing from context in a cloze text, for example, is a different kind of guessing from three or four choices in a multiple choice sentence. What other language knowledge do they use to make guesses in multiple choice sentences? Which kinds of exercise ask them to think about the words? Which ones ask them to use the words creatively? Which exercise types require other skills? (Comprehension questions require reading skills for example.) Which kind of exercise do they prefer and why?

Then, to get a broader picture, students can look through their Students’ Books and Workbooks and find as many different kinds of vocabulary exercises as they can, and, at the same time, they can consider which types are appropriate to use in a test. By this time, a list of different vocabulary exercise test types can be written on the board and students can be asked to rank them in order on a piece of paper: putting the ones which they like and are good at at the top and the ones they don’t like and are not so good at at the bottom.

In pairs they can then discuss reasons for their reactions and write them on their sheet. The sheets are collected in and the results are collated on a poster or overhead transparency.

Already the students have been able to evaluate ‘how’ they are tested, to think about a variety of options and to think about which type of exercise suits them best. The teacher has collected in some important qualitative information about the process of testing which can be used to inform the construction of the next test and, perhaps also, the teaching which leads up to the next test.

The next test

The next test can be prepared in the normal way except that, on the test paper, the teacher can put two different kinds of exercises to test the same material from which the students have a choice: they must do the exercise which they think they will do best at. The teacher marks the test as usual but at the same time, makes a note of the choices the students made and checks whether students did better or worse than they did on previous tests. When the test is returned to the students they will know not just how much they know but also how correct they were in their choice. In other words, they will have learnt something more about their own learning strength.

This kind of evaluation process allows the teacher to understand more about the individual student’s learning preferences but also shows that often it may not be the material, in this case, the vocabulary, which is causing a problem for the students, but the manner – the way – in which it is being tested, or, possibly even being taught. This kind of approach to a test allows for the results to become the next stage of the teaching process and the next stage of the students’ learning process.

If the students have chosen which part of the test to do, the success or failure of that choice can become a subject of discussion: how did they prepare for the vocabulary test? What different approaches did they use and why? Finding out what students do to help themselves learn provides fundamental qualitative data for all teachers. Some students may not prepare well for a test because they are not sure what to do or they know that the strategies they have used before have been unsuccessful and they don't know how to replace them. Unless they learn other strategies they may stop preparing for tests altogether because they know they will fail. Some students may like to keep an evaluation ‘diary’ or journal in which they can record what kinds of strategies they used to prepare for tests or learn their new vocabulary.

Students spend about 10,000 hours of their lifetime trying to learn at school: it is important that some of those hours are spent on evaluating and discussing how that learning happens, or doesn’t happen!

Assessment and evaluation cannot always walk hand in hand: assessment is needed for administration purposes. However, the process of teaching and learning can benefit enormously from the flexibility provided by building evaluative systems into smaller assessment tests so that ongoing testing becomes a ‘user-friendly', ‘hand-holding’ activity rather than an isolating threat.

This article has been adapted from Cambridge English for Schools Teacher’s Book 3

Students analysing exercises.
Illustration by Amanda MacPhail

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