There is a lot of confusion over these two terms as well as other terms associated with assessment, testing, and evaluation.  I still get confused with the terms summative and formative, (but I was recently told summative means to sum it up and that helped).  With all the hype about No Child Left Behind, assessment, testing and evaluation are hot topics.

To me, the big difference can be summarized as this: assessment is information gathered by the teacher and student to drive instruction, while evaluation is when a teacher uses some instrument (such as the CMT or an end-of-unit test) to rate a student so that this information can be used to compare or sort students.  Assessment is for the student and the teacher in the act of learning while evaluation is usually for others.

“If mathematics teachers were to focus their efforts on classroom assessment that is primarily formative in nature, students’ learning gains would be impressive.  These efforts would include gathering data through classroom questioning and discourse, using a variety of assessment tasks, and attending primarily to what students know and understand” (Wilson & Kenney, page 55).

Assessment is a lot more important because it is integral to instruction. Unfortunately, it is being hampered by the demands of evaluation.  The biggest demand for evaluation is grading or report cards.  There shouldn’t be a problem with that, except historically evaluation (grades) were determined exclusively by computing a student’s numeric average on paper and pencil assessments called quizzes or tests.

“Most experienced teachers will say that they know a great deal about their students in terms of what the students know, how they perform in different situations, their attitudes and beliefs, and their various levels of skill attainment.  Unfortunately, when it comes to grades, they often ignore this rich storehouse of information and rely on test scores and rigid averages that tell only a small fraction of the story.

The myth of grading by statistical number crunching is so firmly ingrained in schooling at all levels that you may find it hard to abandon.  But it is unfair to students, to parents, and to you as the teacher to ignore all of the information you get almost daily from a problem-based approach in favor of a handful of numbers based on tests that usually focus on low-level skills” (Van de Walle and Lovin, page 35).

The reason this is a problem is that students learn what is valued and they strive to do well on those things.  If the end-of-unit tests are what are used to determine your grade, guess what kids want to do well on, the end-of-unit test!  You can do all the great activities you want, but if the bottom line is the test, then that is what is going to be valued most by everyone: teachers, students, and parents, alike. 

What we need to get better at is valuing the day-to-day activities we do and learn how to use them for both assessment and evaluation. 

This will not be an easy task. 

It is very different from what we are used to doing.  We are used to teaching and then assessing.  In reality, the line between teaching and assessment should be blurred (NCTM, 2000).  “Interestingly, in some languages, learning and teaching are the same word”(Fosnot and Dolk, page 1). We need to assess on a daily basis to give us the information to make choices about what to teach the next day.  If we just teach the whole unit and wait until the end-of-unit test to find out what the kids know, we may be very unhappily surprised.  On the other hand, if we are assessing on a daily basis throughout the unit, we do not need to average all those assessments to come up with a final evaluation.  Instead, we could just use the most recent assessments to make that evaluation.  In this way, we do not penalize the student that did not know much at the beginning of the unit and worked really hard to learn what you felt were the big ideas. Instead we rate them on where they are when you finished the unit.  This gives a more accurate report or evaluation of where they are performing when the evaluation is made.

References:

Teaching Student-Centered Mathematics (K-3). John van de Walle and LouAnn Lovin, Pearson Publishing, 2006.

Classroom and Large- Scale Assessment. Wilson and Kenney.  This article appeared in A Research Companion to Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM), 2003, (pages 53-67).

Principles and Standards for School Mathematics. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), 2000.

Young Mathematicians at Work, Constructing Number Sense, Addition, and Subtraction.  By Catherine Twomey Fosnot and Maarten Dolk, Heinemann