Northern College Good Practice Guide in Teaching and Learning

16.1 Evaluation is an important part of quality assurance in teaching and learning. Generally speaking, it can be defined as the process by which any activity is, after its completion, reviewed, and informed judgements made, on the basis of available evidence, as to its overall success or failure to achieve its aims. The judgements themselves will focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the activity in relation to what it sets out to achieve, and its impact on those participating in it, or directly and indirectly affected.

16.2 Rather like audit exercises, evaluations can be both internal and external. In terms of the teaching and learning activities of a college - certainly of the Northern College - this means that teaching staff conduct their own ongoing evaluations of courses (and sometimes programmes), and that these are fed into the College's quality assurance mechanisms. These can be regarded as 'internal evaluations'. External evaluations of various kinds are made by a range of different individuals and bodies. These are likely to include:

However, in all cases, the evaluations made - whether internal or external - will be made on the basis of information (interviews, discussions, documents and examples of student work) provided by the College through its staff, students and former students.

16.3 All evaluations contribute to good practice in teaching and learning. However, the ongoing, internal evaluations are probably the most important. Firstly, they provide a major part of the information on which external evaluations are likely to be conducted. Secondly, they require teaching staff to reflect upon their practice, and to change it where necessary. Thirdly, they draw students directly into the process of evaluating not only their individual learning experience, but enable them also to contribute to improving the experience of other learners.

16.4 Collecting the information on which evaluation exercises can be based should therefore become an important part of teaching and learning practice. It should be a routine procedure in fact, and is likely to be built in to any comprehensive quality assurance policy and its related procedures. Information (or evidence as it may also be called) is likely to be of the following kinds:

Student evaluation questionnaires, completed for each course, module or course unit
Records of peer observation of individual teaching sessions
Student attainment records and examples of work (i.e. learning diaries, essays, project work etc.)
Course and programme reviews

Reports of external moderators and examiners, and feedback and reports from inspectors will frequently be taken into account when carrying out course and programme reviews, but are not evidence over which the College has any direct control.

16.5 The final stage of the teaching and learning evaluation process comes after the completion of a course or programme review. The evidence obtained, and the judgements formed may indicate that not only do certain changes need to be made, but that they should also be the subject of planned staff development and training. This can then be implemented over a period of time.

16.6 The most difficult part of the internal evaluation process is clearly the course or programme review. This is a time-consuming exercise, requiring the detailed and painstaking sifting and consideration of evidence. Sometimes the accuracy and validity of the evidence available needs to be checked. At the end of this work, a report has to be made and agreed. Full-scale exercises of this kind cannot occur frequently in the course of a year: one or two at most are possible, given time constraints and other commitments. However, they should be planned in advance, and regarded as an important part of the overall quality assurance procedure, with designated senior staff - usually programme area co-ordinators - being given the responsibility for completing them.

16.7 It is, of course, vital that evaluation should be a means of actively improving teaching and learning, and should not be allowed to become an exercise that is emptily bureaucratic. This is always a danger, and where it happens, the real work of quality assurance - to make sure that where teaching and learning can be improved, the changes necessary to bring this about are made - will be weakened.