METHODOLOGIES FOR THE EVALUATION OF LEARNING OUTCOMES

Although learning can often take place without teaching, one cannot have successful teaching without learning. If the teacher waits until the end of the course to perform the evaluation, important gaps can be found between what has been taught and what has been learnt, and what is worse, there is no time left to correct the errors. It seems clear that some sort of continuous evaluation should take place to detect and solve problems in the learning process as soon as they appear.
Continuous evaluation should be as efficient as possible, and the main characteristics of good quality evaluation are discussed in the paper. In order to carry out good quality evaluation, teachers must have a clear idea of the learning outcomes they want to achieve in their students. The importance of having a clear set of instructional objectives and a tool to obtain it are also described in the paper.
There is a wealth of experience in other teachers that have successfully applied different evaluation techniques in the past. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel yet once again it is wise to base our efforts in that previous experience and adapt the techniques to our particular context. In that mindset, a selected group of evaluation techniques is presented to be used as a toolbox, where each technique can be adapted to suit different learning environment situations.