The philosophy and Psychology of Educational Evaluation

Philosophers use evaluation as to basically promote an individual's work.Therefore teachers need to be aware of individual differences among their learners.The teacher should be flexible and willing to do something about such learner's differences .Pupils need to be motivated to be successful in their work, as teacher provide with opportunities to excel.A stimulus teacher should further expose the learners to the opportunities for setting their own standards of self evalution.
The learner can evaluates his/her own performance against the standards s/he sets for himself/herself.If there is improvement this will motivared him/her to keep on practising.
Evaluation is basically done inorder to improve the situation and can be done with the pupils and not to them.Hence it provides the data to diagonise the remedy defects in instruction.Teachers can therefore assist their learners to assess their weaknesses and strengths.The teacher should fairy assess the individual pupils' ability to learn.
A good teacher respects learners' personalities and reflectively help them to develop their full potential.
Psychology of evaluation is most successful when a pupil is ready for it.That's when they understand concepts ,the value and meet the objectives set.According to Thorndike's law of effect ,pupils tend to carry on those activities that result in success.
If the teacher's tests generally concentrate on the role of memory the pupils learn to memorise inorder to respond to the teacher's tests.Therefore it is necessary for the teacher to use all types of tests to encourage learners to study all areas of their work and develop all types of skills.
Pupils recognise the importance of their learning and learn better only if they constantly get feedback on their performance,their motivation is very useful when we make evaluations.Performance in a test is directly related to their motivational stimulus.The learner moreover, continue to perfect their work inorder to improve their performance.Learning become more meaningful and efficient when the learner is actively involved in learning.Pierced and Lober(1990:145)view evaluation as:
"A means for determining what need improvement and for providing a basis for effecting that improvement .It has to do with gathered and combined in relation to a weighted set of goals of scales which allow people to make judgement about worth."
There are two major types of evaluations done in teaching and learning these are formative and summative evaluation which we shall look in the next article.