Teacher Education Overview of Programme Evaluation Strategies
In modern day education, people do lot of questioning in relation to its validity and reliability in gaining the expected outcomes. The authorities would try and scrutinize many of the programmes which seek their accreditation in order to keep high levels of standards and practices. In a era where training programmes are cropping up like mushrooms, it is vital that institutions as well as educational developers put more emphasize on implementing programme monitoring and implementation strategies and models along with the task of designing realistic and achievable outcomes as well as developing high quality course material.
In doing so, educationists have come up with several types of evaluation strategies which would cater to different kinds of requirements. The difficult part in any of such evaluation process would be to convince the stake holders or the ones who are going to be ‘critically evaluated’ to comply with a proposed evaluation strategy and gain their confidence in that the evaluation would be a guide or a recommendation for them to follow in revising and developing programmes of study.
In this regard, using the right sort of strategy is vital for a analyst who undertakes the evaluation process and the following will be a brief description of evaluation strategies that are in existence which can be rather useful.
Objectives oriented:
This involves the determination of to what extent the objectives has been achieved. In most instances, the grades would be the marker for such analysis and this itself can brought about few criticisms as the grade may not represent the actual learning that has taken place especially in cases of poorly defined learning objectives.
Management oriented:
This strategy focuses on evaluations in order to guide the decision makers and would be useful in instances such as fund allocation, making policy decisions, administrative decision making…etc.
Consumer oriented:
This strategy is market driven and would be useful in branding and labelling the product to be presented to another set of potential candidates.
Expertise oriented:
It makes use of professional expertise that has been achieved through a learning programme and would be rather useful in accreditation matters.
Adversary oriented:
This strategy tries to incorporate both negative and positive views to the evaluation and therefore creating an unbiased evaluation.
Participant oriented:
This type of strategy will involve all stake holders and would be of value for all as well.
Thus, it is evident that, before embarking on collecting data, the evaluation strategy should be clearly defined and accepted to all stake holders. But, the good thing is, once a evaluation strategy is in place and undertaken, the feedback it gives would be an enormous support in improving the quality level of a programme of study.
