APPRAISING DIVERSITY: THE EVALUATION PROCESS TO ENCOURAGE SCHOOL SUCCESS

The “classroom” daily experience forces teachers to face a lot of problems; among which the encountering difficulty in getting integration between very different students. Class heterogeneity is the result of various factors: through these, cultural identity or class origins, personality, learning disabilities and, also, students motivation and attitude. This inevitably implies an ever-increasing need to diversify and customize educational path, and also the consequent evaluation process. Identifying, knowing and operating as a function of individual differences, make school stakeholders able to create a high quality and comprehensive school, that holds and sustains the student’s growth, as future citizen, contrasting negative results, as the scholastic failure or the dropout phenomenon. The present paper, based on a well-defined analysis about diversity and inclusion concepts, aims to underline how the evaluation process can be a really important experience for each student, particularly for that students who start from a disadvantaged situation. This work purpose is to underline how an appropriate educational needs analysis and a suitable students characteristic inquiry could prevent educational threats, supporting, consequently, inclusion and scholastic success. In this paper, methodology used is the analysis of the specialist literature and the comparison between good practices; these are keys to think over the evaluation as a formal act; in other words, to consider its as a pedagogical fact, that assumes conscious choices related to a specific project that focus on giving value to diversity. In this perspective, the evaluation process become key to promote inclusive procedures, and more in general, to improve learning processes. The authors suggest that additional gap has to be oriented towards sharing whit the user about the evaluation importance. That is to say, the student has to be conscious about the importance of the evaluation process in one’s own growing process and, in appraising each one characteristics: these do not represent diversity, instead real added value.