What are we evaluating?
Students’ experience of learning:
• Experience of lecturers and lecturing
• Experience of class activities, assignments and
materials
What are we evaluating?
Students’ knowledge and skills in relation to the course:
• Prior knowledge, recall and understanding
• Analysis and critical thinking
• Synthesis and creative thinking
• Solving problems
• Application and performance
What are we evaluating?
Students’ attitudes, values and awareness:
• Awareness of attitudes and values
• Self-awareness as learners
• Course related learning and study skills
Factors affecting evaluation
 Focus of evaluation
 Timing
• Logistics and resources
• Lecturer
• Feedback to students
Methods for gaining student feedback
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Questionnaires
Electronic questionnaires
Tracking student activity in BlackBoard
Observations of teaching
Student focus groups
Online student focus groups
Interviews
Diaries, portfolios and reflexive Logs
In-class evaluation methods
Theory of Change
 a theory of how and why an initiative works
(Weiss 1995)
Theory of Change - advantages
• Implicit in planning and implementation of a teaching cycle.
• Focus on information is needed for evaluation. Used to write
evaluation tools and analyse information.
• Aligns with reflection on teaching.
• Indicators not a tick list (not performance indicators) but a
theory.
• What do you learn about your theory of change?
Planning for evaluation
A theory of change should be:
• Plausible
• Doable
• Testable
Planning for evaluation
•
What is evaluation for?
•
How can we gain feedback from students?
•
How can we identify what we are evaluating?
•
How can we focus evaluation questions ?
•
How can we decide what methods to use?
•
How can we produce evaluation tools?
•
How can we analyse and report findings?