ABSTRACT
There are three words in education that refer to the gathering of evidence and making of judgements: assessment, which usually refers to students, and which was explored in Sections 23 and 24; appraisal, which usually applies to staff; and evaluation, which usually relates to courses and teaching. This section is concerned with the last. Even if a course ran only once, it would be important purely for professional reasons to evaluate it and see how successful it had been. However, education is typically a repetitive activity in which courses run again and again and often come round in a regular cycle. This makes it all the more important to find out what happened during one course so that any lessons can be learned for subsequent ones. The most obvious indication of this is the results. As was pointed out in Section 25, however, it is not always easy to know what led to success or failure, or to what causes effects should be attributed. This means that one needs to probe further into the processes and interstices of the course: the aims, the curriculum, the materials, the teaching and learning, the environment, indeed many of the questions posed in this book. Having gathered such information one has to analyse and synthesize it in some judgement or set of judgements about what happened. Such judgements can then be fed into decisions about the next course. Thus the loop is closed.
