The reasons why it is important to evaluate learning activities are:
- To see what is working and what needs removing or changing
- To assess how the activities are being delivered and how they could be improved
- To see how the activities are being received by the participants
Evaluation is important as it helps out when planning and helps you to think about the learning that has taken place. Spending time going through the learning activities and seeing how students have responded to a certain task or question, can really help re-shape it for future classes.
It is also important to look back at the learning objects so you can measure what the children have learned. If you do not think carefully about learning objectives at the planning stage, it will not always be possible to evaluate whether pupils have achieved them. Learning objectives need to be clear for this to be possible.
- Learners must understand what the outcomes mean.
- They must be achievable.
- We must be able to assess pupils against them.
Evaluating helps you to see if something is succeeding or may need changing. If students whizzed through the activity and then looked rather bored then it would be obvious that the task was a bit too easy and not really suitable or beneficial for that group. Therefore you would need to try and make it more engaging and stimulating, perhaps by making it more difficult or time-consuming so the students really have to work to complete it. If the activities are taking longer than expected and you can see that the students are really struggling, things again would need to be addressed.
Students may not meet the learning objective, but they could have a real enthusiasm for the subject and have participated fully in all aspects of the lesson. You will need to record this somewhere. You should also look at the resources you have used and whether these are successfully used. Without evaluation the learning activities would be rather rigid and any flaws would never be truly addressed. Therefore evaluating the activities and improving based on your findings will help you and students move forward and have the best possible learning experience.
