The Evaluation of Learning

Problems of assessment and the evaluation of student learning are currently being given more attention by teachers and students than at any other time. University teachers have expressed their concern at the shortcomings of traditional methods, students have protested and in some cases torn up their question papers. The shortcomings of conventional examining methods are well documented and a convenient recent symposium is to be found in Universities Quarterly (1967). This present paper suggests some possible approaches to the evaluation of student learning which could help to improve present procedures. What I am suggesting is akin to what is sometimes called ‘continuous assessment’, although the general line of the argument also bears on other methods of evaluation. In my own work, teaching a variety of courses in a University School of Education, I like to take a view of teaching which is perhaps appropriate to this journal and which may be summed up in the phrase: diagnosis -prescription evaluation. This view suggests that the teaching model involves, in the first instance, an examination of the capabilities of the student when he enters: this is diagnosis. The question we ask is, has the student got the prerequisite capabilities for embarking on the learning in question? If he hasn’t, then it really is a mistaken policy to get him to embark on it. Once we are satisfied that the student is ready for the instruction we start him on an appropriate course. This is prescription. Finally we check to see if learning is satisfactory. This is evaluation. The process does not, of course, end there; often the end of the course becomes the starting point for the next. Thus the evaluation test for Course A should relate closely to the diagnostic test for Course B.