Evaluation and assessment

In this master, we have learnt the differences lying between evaluation which is often present in students' daily lives and assessment in Didactics. I have to admit that when we were studying them, I was surprised by this idea of providing the students with feedback and its contrast with evaluation. I believ that nowadays the most important aspect for teachers is to evaluate students and that they are defined

Assessment is basically focused on the idea of giving and receiving feedback from student to teacher and viceversa . That is to say, that students give valuable feedback to the teacher about how they can improve their classes and in exchange they get information about how to improve their work in order to obtain a better grade. Assessing therefore would be related to this idea of being able to improve and achieve better grades if one is willing to listen to others' feedback and the positive aspect of it is that it is only formative, and this feedback is not used to measure students' knowledge but rather to help them achieve their goals.

In contrast, evaluation is always seen as one of the most important things for teachers. Nowadays, the trend is to evaluate students at all times to be able to see whether the students have been able to achieve a certain level of undertsanding about the topics and subjects in hand or, on the contrary they still lack this level. The main objective of this evaluation is to grade students based on their individual work and knowledge.

To sum up, having said all of this I believe that teachers should provide students with feedback about their work in order to help them improve and to achieve a better understanding of what is required of them. In order to do so, I believe that the stress should be put in the combination of both assessing and evaluating afterwards rather than emphasising this common idea of grading students at all times.