Evaluation in the sense of "the systematic investigation of the worth or merit of some object" has several meanings within education. Most common purpose is to grade and classify students, to sort out the successes from the failures. There are concerns about program evaluation, where the focus is on how well a particular educational program, curriculum or teaching method works, how it might be improved and how it compares with alternatives.
Such evaluation has and continues to be done by formal agencies. During the late 1950's and early 1960's the pace of innovation increased with the introduction of new curricula new teaching methods, and new programs aimed at disadvantaged groups. These innovations cost and scale led to a demand for more evaluation and this has produced an increase in professional evaluators. In the present day educational evaluation is a legitimate field of intellectual endeavor and has its own associations, journals, conferences and theorists.
There are also controversies and disputes as to the most appropriate aims, methods, theories, etc. To explain and discuss the merits of each of the various paradigms in any detail would require far too much space. Instead it is characterized two very different approaches which, while they are "ideal types", serve to indicate the major divisions within the field.
There is the "traditional", "positivist-empiricist" or "agricultural-botany" approach to evaluation. This characterizes the attempt to apply the rules and procedures of the physical sciences to the evaluation area. Here is how this would work in practice:
An appropriate evaluation requires the experiment or project is structured, from the start, with the design requirements of the evaluator in mind. Only like this a thorough-going study can be launched. Equivalent samples must be picked, controls established, and the variables selected for which data will be gathered. Possibly, the evaluator is to require the scheme's organizers to define their objectives, either from scratch or using objectives taken from pre-existing lists.
The next step is to select or construct appropriate objective tests. Item analysis, pre-testing, checks on reliability, and perhaps, the piloting of questionnaires and attitude inventories can then all follow. Next is the administering of the tests. If completed, the evaluator disappears from the field to analyze his data, only to reappear some months or years later bearing his report.
The ultimate form:
Large, delicately balanced samples are formed into experiment and control groups; they are tested before the pedagogical "treatment" is applied and tested again afterwards; "before and after" and "between samples" comparisons can then be drawn.
This signifies the orthodox position in evaluation, the ideal to which most evaluators strive. In recent years there has been a counter movement which has challenged this orthodoxy. Human inquiry: a sourcebook of new paradigm research, new directions in educational evaluation have documented the weaknesses of the traditional approach and have suggested alternatives.
It is not easy to sum up this new movement because its members are more united by their rejection of the old orthodoxy than their adherence to a new orthodoxy. On the whole the application of physical science methods to complex human phenomena is seen to be invalid, it produces "dead knowledge" which is seldom used and is immoral in that it frequently involves manipulation of the subjects under study. The way ahead is seen in terms of a more naturalistic methodology and a holistic perspective on human affairs. It is necessary to admit the complexities of the evaluation process - the fact that there might be several potential audiences with different information needs, the impact of the evaluators own values, the need to adapt one's methodology when, for example, the program produces unforeseen side-effects.
By increasing in publicly-funded distance education over the last fifteen years, often by the creation of new institutions has come a corresponding increase in the amount of educational evaluation in this area. Along with most innovations, evaluation required justifying continued funding but also it is necessary because of the invisibility of distance students.
Distance education innovations frequently involve new teaching methods, new media, new student groups, new curricula and new institutions. In such backgrounds "evaluation" tends to cover broad range of activities and employs the full arsenal of social science methods of data collection and analysis. In distance education evaluators are aware of the traditional versus the new paradigm debate and attempts have been made to overcome the problems of conducting essentially qualitative research with distance students. On the other hand, distance education evaluation remains eclectic as to its methods and this seems to be inevitable when we consider what such evaluation consists of.
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