ABSTRACT
If you have any teaching experience at all, you probably know that most students are at least as interested in how their learning will be evaluatedand especially how their grades will be determined-as they are in what the course has to offer them. In fact, students’ intense interest in, and emotional involvement with, your evaluation of their learning can make the evaluative process quite stressful, especially for less experienced faculty (Eble, 1988). For most psychology teachers, the greatest challenge associated with evaluation is to develop quizzes, tests, writing assignments, and other performance measures that assess learning in a manner that they, and their students, see as reliable, valid, and fair. They don’t want to be seen as pushovers when it comes to evaluation and grading, but neither do they want to establish standards that are impossibly high. Some psychology faculty are also uncomfortable about taking on the role of an “examiner” who sets standards by which other people are to be judged (Ebel, 1965). Yet this is precisely what your departmental ex-ecutive officers, your colleagues, and your students expect you to do. In this chapter we consider some alternatives for evaluating student learning and we offer some ideas for evaluation procedures that can actually enhance that learning.
