Why we need evaluation?

Why we need evaluation?

Evaluation is needed every time, when we consider some kind of change. As all sides of education are in a continuous change nowadays, we need to evaluate our educational projects regularly. It is specially true when we'll try to introduce some new learning methodology and after first enthusiastic experiment want to set it on a regular bases, so that this new method becomes well designed, well organised, well run and effective, usable not only by ourselves, but also by our colleagues near and far.

There are always many components in the educational process: students, teacher, school organisation and environment, social culture of the region and country, parents, etc. What we have to do differently to get better learning results in our project based collaborative effort? How to plan and run evaluation of different sides of our project to succeed next time even better than this time? Do we know how successful was our project this time at all? How different participant perceived it? How to analyze - is the project my colleagues ran last year applicable to me, to my class? How do I have to change it according to my circumstances? This site is created to answer these questions.
How to proceed further?

If you are teacher and want to understand, what you have to do before your project, during the project and after it - look at our "For teachers" pages.
If you need some new tool to to evaluate your own project - look at our evaluation tools pages, where more that 10 tools are described and blueprints, how to implement them, are presented.
If you want to look how other teachers have successfully used different evaluation tools to evaluate their own projects - look at "Examples" page.
If you want to understand, why evaluation is important - please read further.
What is evaluation and why we have to evaluate our collaborative e-projects?

Evaluation is an activity with which every teacher is familiar with. But in different schools and different countries different terms can be used and every school has its own culture and attitude to evaluation. This page is to explaine, how terms are used in our ECOLE site. Evaluation has to answer several questions, like: Does it work? How does it work? Why does it work? Who makes it work? With whom it does it work? Can it be replicated? Can it be transferred? Can it be adapted? Can it be scaled? Adaptation of technical innovation is social problem and many social laws have been discovered during last fifty years. One of them is Innovation adoption curve of Rogers, which divides innovation adapters into 5 categories: innovators, early adapters, early majority, late majority and laggards. This curve is explained in the web page of Value Based Management net's Innovation Management Curve page . In those pages we'll try to offer Teacher's Professional continuum for evaluation.
Conceptual model of the evaliuation.
Evaluation process consists of many steps.
Choose tools for evaluation.
Develop evaluation questions.
Collect data.
Analyze data.
Our aim: to make easier for teachers to develop useful, high quality evaluation. We can evaluate our project only on the bases of information we have at hand. And quality of our evaluation depends strughtforward of the quality of this information.