Structure
1 Introduction
2 Objectives
3 Why Do We Evaluate?
4 What to Evaluate?
5 When to Evaluate and the Types of Evaluation
6 How to Evaluate: Tools and Techniques of Evaluation
7 Some Sample Evaluation Tools
1 INTRODUCTION
In different methods and strategies for transacting Environmental Studies Curriculum
have been discussed. How would you know that the methods used for a particular lesson
have effectively conveyed to the pupils what it was meant to convey? In other words, you
may like to know whether objectives of the lesson have been fulfilled. You may also like to
know whether your teaching method was effective. You might have also undergone similar
experience in your day-to-day teaching. Often you try to make a quick judgement of
pupils’ learning by asking questions during the course of a particular session. At the end of
a unit, a unit test helps you to grade the pupils on the basis of their performance. All these
activities may form a part of the evaluation process. There are different ways by which
you can evaluate pupil’s learning.
In this topic, we shall take up the fundamental aspects of evaluation. These are:
! Why do evaluate?
! What to evaluate?
! How to evaluate?
! When to evaluate?
! How to record the findings of evaluation?
! How to make use of the findings of an evaluation?
Apart from dealing with the above questions we shall also discuss the different tools and
techniques of evaluation and the ways to develop some evaluation tools and methods for
keeping records of pupil’s learning.
2 OBJECTIVES
After going through this unit, you should be able to :
! differentiate between assessment and evaluation;
! distinguish between formative and summative evaluation by citing examples of each;
! describe the meaning of continuous and comprehensive evaluation and identify its
various components and techniques; ! apply the techniques of comprehensive and continuous evaluation;
! identify the specific problems related to evaluating process-based objectives in
Environmental Studies;
! prepare sample evaluation tools;
! prepare and use simple procedure for recording pupil achievement;
! make use of evaluation data.
3 WHY DO WE EVALUATE ?
Whenever we undertake any activity we always have in our mind the objectives of doing
it. At the end of the activity we often try to find out if the activity was worth-while or not.
That is, we try to assess and make value judgement of the activity. In other words, we try
to evaluate our actions. Similarly, when you plan any teaching- learning activity you have
some objectives in your mind. To plan further learning activities for newer experiences,
you must know to what extent your pupils have achieved the objectives set forth in the
earlier activity. If your pupils have not achieved these objectives, it will be useless to plan
further learning experiences. Can you tell, why?
To give valid information on how and to what extent the pupils have acquired certain
skills/understanding concepts/knowledge of certain content you employ various methods
to evaluate the learning. The most common and familiar method to use is a unit test. But
evaluation process has many other features. What are these?
Evaluation
! helps you to find out whether your pupils have acquired requisite knowledge of
facts, developed understanding of principles and generalizations developed intended
skills and application ability. It provides you with concrete and reliable evidence of
pupil’s learning.
! provides you with a feedback about your teaching so that you could modify the
methods for better results. For example, after teaching a particular lesson you find
that majority pupils are not able to give right answers, you should pause and ask
yourself, the following questions:
Did I use the correct method of communication? Were the activities conducted appropriate to the age level of pupils and according to their interest?
Did I use language appropriate for the age group?
! provides you with the insight into the strenghts and weaknesses of your teaching.
! also gives feedback about strengths of individual students as well as their weaknesses.
The process of evaluation helps you to make a value judgement about the teachinglearning process. This judgement is both in terms of growth, development and achievement
of pupils and also improving your own teaching style. Hence, we can say that Evaluation
is, in fact, a part and parcel of any teaching-learning process. It helps to improve the
performance of pupils and also your own performance.
To sum up, evaluation is a process that helps you to :
! get information on how and to what tent your pupils have acquired learning;
! obtain feedback on individual child’s learning process;
! assess your own teaching;
! identify your strengths and weaknesses and make improvements accordingly;
! plan remedial teaching for slow learners;
! plan enrichment for fast learners.
4 WHAT TO EVALUATE?
Three components of Environmental Studies, i.e., Education about the Environment;
education through the environment; and education for the environment have been
given emphasis in organizing curriculum, in developing teaching-learning materials and in
adopting teaching-learning strategies in the classroom.
a) Learning about the environment includes knowledge of components of environment.
These are objects, events, phenomena occurring in and around the child. It also includes
knowledge of social institutions, their structure and function, local traditions, customs,
culture, etc. It includes understanding of various principles, drawing of generalizations
related to above aspects of the environment.
b) Learning through the environment means using environment and its different
components as a means of learning. The environment, therefore, is used as a vehicle
of learning through its systematic exploration. While observing the different aspects
of the environment, the children develop skills of observation, recording of data,
classification and grouping of data, collection and sorting of information finding out
cause and effect relationship, drawing inferences, etc. They learn to do things
themselves by using all sense organs.
c) Learning for the environment means using the knowledge and skills to help in improving
the environment. It includes feeling of concerns, need to initiate action, voluntary
participation in activities related to environment protection.
While planning teaching-learning activities you should see that these aspects of
Environmental Studies are taken care of. In this topic you have learnt how to formulate
objectives of Environmental Studies.
How do we write the specific learning outcomes related to each of the above aspects? Let
us look at some examples of intended learning outcomes of a specific unit. Given below
are statements of some learning outcomes. Let us examine each of these outcomes to find
out elements of similarity and difference. Let us also see which of these outcomes try to
assess the teaching-learning processes pertaining to three aspect of Environmental Studies,
discussed above.
Unit : Water
Learning Outcomes
! Recall different uses of water
! State the different sources of water in the locality.
! Identify various sources of water in the locality, which are used for drinking and
cooking purposes.
! List the ways in which the source of drinking water gets polluted.
! Devise simple methods by which water can be made safe for drinking and cooking.
! See the relationship between drinking impure/polluted water and occurence of water
borne diseases such as, dysentery, cholera, etc.
! Draw a generalization that drinking polluted water is harmful for health.
! Prepare posters to show how water gets polluted.
! List community actions that could prevent pollution of water sources, examples –
poster campaign, door-to-door publicity drama/role play.
! If in a village, approach the Gram Panchayat, the leader of the local body and discuss
with her the ways in which drinking water can be made safe.
The above statement of objectives covers all the three aspects, i.e., to know and to feel
concern and to take community action. Technically they belong to three separate areas of
learning or domains. These three domains of learning have been discussed in detail in
Unit 2. You as a teacher need to know what outward behaviour of the child gives you
indication that she has acquired the objectives related to these three domains.
Once again read carefully the outcomes stated in the example discussed above. Group
these outcomes into cognitive, psychomotor and affective domains. To assess these
outcomes it is important for you to know the overall behaviour of pupils, which could
reflect whether she has achieved these or not.
Thus, you have seen that to evaluate pupil’s learning achievement it is essential to break
up the broad objectives into simple outcomes specifying the assessable behaviours.
However, all learning outcomes cannot be broken up into such quantifiable forms,
which are tangible to assessment. For broad parameters, action verbs that might help
you to list the objectives of cognitive domain are:
! recall;
! recognize;
! state/define;
! distinguish;
! compare and contrast;
! identify;
! generalize;
! cite example;
! infer, etc.
The objectives of psychomotor domain have to do with manipulative skills. These skills
may range from making simple drawings to finding measurements and drawing to scale.
For evaluating objectives of psychomotor domain also, the learning outcomes can be
stated in terms of specific assessable behaviour. The objectives of affective domain have
to deal with feelings, concern and other emotions. It also deals with child’s interest’s
attitudes and values. Since Environmental Studies is a value- oriented education, it
is all the more necessary to evaluate this aspect of learning. The action verbs you
can consider using are: volunteer, express freely, choose freely, do willingly and respond
spontaneously etc. As stated earlier, the objectives expressed in behavioural terms are
for the convenience and clarity of the teachers and need not be overstressed all the time.
Before we proceed further how about attempting the ‘Check Your Progress’ exercise
given below.
5 WHEN TO EVALUATE AND THE TYPES OF EVALUATION
For deciding on the design of evaluation, it would be useful for you to ask yourself the
following questions:
! When should I evaluate my pupils?
! What is my objective for evaluation? Is it for grading each child? Or is it to find out their learning difficulties?
! Should I evaluate the class as a whole and compare their performance or evaluate in
groups to assess the growth and development of each child?
! How much of the learning is to be evaluated and how often ?
! How shall I keep a record of evaluation?
In our educational system we often give test and resort to two types of evaluation. One
type of evaluation is school-based and conducted by the teacher. It is called internal
assessment. Another type of evaluation is generally conducted by an outside agency. This
is called the external examination that generally means to most of you an examination or a
test. At the primary stage in many states of our country there is no external examination.
The evaluation of pupils is done by the teacher as a part of her day-to-day teaching. The
purpose of internal assessment is to improve the levels of achievement
This type of assessment covers both scholastic and non-scholastic aspect of pupil’s
achievement. It is a continuous informal part of the total teaching-learning programme.
Depending on what and why you want to evaluate the internal mode of evaluation, varies.
The most familiar mode of internal assessment used by any classroom teaching is a unit
test. Here, you evaluate pupil’s learning after completion of a unit. A unit test is generally
a paper-pencil test, It helps you to test mostly the knowledge or cognitive aspect of pupil’s
learning. In this case evaluation is done after completion of a certain unit. Such type of
evaluation is called Summative Evaluation. Sometimes a unit is very long, divided into
sub-units. A series of tests are conducted, that is, after completion of each sub-unit at
short intervals of time. Periodicity of pupil evaluation thus varies. When evaluation is built
into the teaching-learning process and provides you with a continuous feedback about
pupil’s progress such type of evaluation is called Formative Evaluation. It helps you to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of your pupils. It also helps to make necessary
modifications in your teaching techniques.
Formative evaluation is more than giving paper-pencil test to evaluate cognitive objectives.
Through continuous built-in evaluation you can make sure of pupil’s growth and
development in a continuous manner. You can develop a number of different types of
tools to assess various aspects of pupils’ growth and development. For example, before
you plan a new lesson you would like to know whether pupils have pre-requisite knowledge
and skills to master it. For this purpose, you can give a pre-test based on the objective of
content concept essential to master the new learning. Such pre-test provides you with
benchmark data. That is, it tells you the levels of ; learning of pupils so that you can plan
the future learning experience. Figure 4.3 gives the design for the pre-test-post-test.
Thus you see that both Formative and Summative Evaluation are part of the total process
of evaluation. Unless you have built the techniques of Formative Evaluation into your
teaching strategies, you cannot find out about the progress of each individual child.
Therefore, we can say that teaching and evaluation are two sides of the same coin.
Continuous process of assessing progress of each child helps in her growth and
development. No backlog of learning or gaps in learning take place. You know that at
the primary stage a policy of no detention is followed. That is, a child is automatically
promoted from one class to another. Unless you ensure that each child has mastered the
levels of learning for that class, she would have great difficulty in understanding what is
intended for the next class. As a result she may even drop-out. Often “no-detention is
interpreted as no-evaluation”. Hence NPE (1986) has emphasized continuous and
comprehensive evaluation. What does this mean?
Ideally, formative evaluation discussed in the earlier section is continuous and
comprehensive. But in practice often only certain congnitive components, i.e., knowledge
of facts are evaluated and all other domains such as psychomotor and affective objectives
are left out. Comprehensive means the evaluation procedure should assess all the three
cognitive, psychomotor and affective domains as well. In both scholastic and nonscholastic areas you know that all learning take place in a sequential manner from simple
to complex. Unless simple tasks are mastered, next level cannot be learnt. Thus evaluation
has to be continuous. The emphasis should be on mastery of basic skills (Science
processes) and desirable values and desirable attitudes.
The development of understanding in environmental science is dependent on the ability
to carry out process skills in a scientific manner. What are process skills? Process skills
are described various ways, all of which suffer from the problem of trying to draw
boundaries round things which are not separable from each other. It is important to note
that these aspects of practice which we call process skills are not single skills but
conglomerates of coherent skills. These can be listed as observing hypothesising, predicting
investigating, interpreting, findings and drawing conclusions, and communicating, etc.
The interconnectedness of the skills is a feature which needs to be borne in mind.
At the general level, the teacher’s role in providing children with experiences which help
them develop process skills has these five aspects:
! Providing opportunity to use process skills in the exploration of materials and
phenomena at first hand;
! Providing opportunity for discussion in small groups and as a whole class; tasks
which are designed to require children to share their ideas to listen to others, to
explain and defend their ideas will necessairly involve them in thinking through
what they have done;
! Listening to their talk and studying their products to find out and processes that
have been used in forming their ideas;
! Encouraging critical review of how activities have been carried out;
6 HOW TO EVALUATE : TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES OF EVALUATION
Once you have selected the design of evaluation, you must select appropriate tools. The
tools should relate to objectives/learning outcomes to be evaluated. The objectives / learning
outcomes are also the starting point for designing teaching-learning activities. Therefore,
let us see in what way teaching-learning situation/activity is different from valuation. The
objectives can be attained in many ways. It would vary from child to child and would
depend on his/her background. However, main features of the process of attaining objectives
at primary stage can be broadly categorized as
! one objective can be attained by planning and using one activity.
! one objective can be attained by planning different activities.
! one activity can be so planned and managed that more than one objective is attained.
! There is a hierarchy within a set of objectives from simple to complex. Each of
these requires different activity.
I. One objective can be attained by one activity
Objective: Pupil estimates and measures the area of a classroom.
Activity: Pupil uses a variety of units to estimate the length and breadth of the classroom,
such as, hand span, pace, etc. Then they measure the actual length and breadth by using
measuring tape. Next they compare the two measurements. In this way they can find out
the area of the classroom. (The same activity can be varied to help pupil understand the
need for standard unit of measurement).
Evaluation: Pupils may be asked to estimate and measure the length and breadth of
their respective note books to find out the areas of the same. There can be many variations
of this example.
The idea is to show that the teaching-learning activity as well as evaluation is based on
active participation of pupils. The evaluation is performance based and is directly related
to the learning outcome intended to be achieved.
II. One objective can be attained by planning and using a variety of activities
Objective. Pupil describes the parts of a flower.
Activity 1. Divide the class into five or six groups. Give every group a typical flower.
Ask children to identify and name each part of the flower.
Activity 2. Display to the pupils a chart of typical flowers.
Activity 3. Show the pupils a model of a flower. Ask them to identify its parts and
name each part.
Evaluation: i) Show the pupils some flowers, which should be different from the
one, used for the teaching session. Ask the pupils to describe these
flowers.
ii) Ask the pupils to draw parts of a flower.
III. One activity can be so planned and managed that more than one objective
is attained
Activity : Visit to a Zoo.
Objectives
! Pupils observe and record the major external features of animals that live in polar
region, in hot desert and other climatic regions of the world.
! Pupils find out similarities and differences in the external features of animals of
different climatic regions.
Evaluation
i) Pupils make generalizations about the effects of climate on animal features.
ii) Pupils can categorise various animals (live or pictures) according to different climatic
zones, based on, the specialities of their external features.
iii) Pupils make prediction on the effect of sudden change in climate condition on animals.
(Note : The above is only an example. In fact, one visit to a zoo can be planned well in
advance to include possible learning experiences that a teacher intends to plan
in future. Visits are expensive and time consuming. Hence, need to be used and
planned carefully)
7 SOME SAMPLE EVALUATION TOOLS
A variety of tools and techniques are used for evaluating pupil’s academic growth and
development. Under the scheme of comprehensive and continuous evaluation, it is expected
that all the aspects of pupils learning will be evaluated, recorded and monitored. Therefore,
you must use a variety of tool and techniques. These can be grouped in two broad categories:
! Those tools which assess the academic achievement. Example, oral test, written
test, performance based tests, etc.
! Those tools which evaluate the development of attitudes, value, interest, skills, etc.
Examples – observation, inquiry, projective techniques and socio-metric methods.
At the primary stage in the case of Environmental Studies your emphasis on evaluation
could be governed by the objectives discussed earlier. Hence, the tools used should also be
very simple. The most common tools that can be used are .
! Oral Questioning.
! Paper-Pencil Test
! Behaviour Tally-Chart
! Observation Check List
! Rating Scale
Tools for Evaluating Academic Achievement
Oral Questioning: Oral test is a commonly used tool, particularly in cases where the
pupils are not able to express themselves in writing. Oral questioning is advantageous in
building feedback mechanism in a teaching-learning situation. It is essential, however, that
the pupils get immediate feedback. It is also necessary to provide remedial measures.
Paper-Pencil Test: This is the most commonly used tool. These are well suited for
evaluating knowledge, understanding, application and some drawing and tracing skills;
These have following disadvantages:
! All objectives cannot be tested by paper-pencil test.
! It creates a formal test situation in the classroom.
! Additionally, it requires reading and writing skills on the part of the pupils.
The objective based objective type questions are not commonly used items in a paper-pencil or written test. Some examples of these types of items are:
! Completion type
! True and false
! Multiple choice
! Matching
! Essay writing
You are already familiar with completion type items that is, fill in the blanks, and the True
and False items. Given below are some examples of Multiple choice and Matching type
items.