Formal Evaluation PD re: SurveyMonkey

We are always evaluating ourselves and our lessons, today's PD is about how I used SurveyMonkey to formally evaluate myself last term.

Examples of Informal evaluation

• Lunch room discussions with teachers
• When speaking with your students, as a whole class or individually

Why you use it:

This is often done as part of 'Formative Assessment' - to see how you or your students are going so that you can adjust your lesson as needed.

Pro/Cons:

Really fast way of getting feedback on how things are going.

Difficult to record for later use or for other teachers to use.

Examples of formal evaluation

• Performance Review
• Surveys of Students and Staff

Why you use it:

This is typically a 'Formative Assessment' you can do at the end of a task/unit/lesson.

Pro/Cons:

The reason why this is normally at the end of a unit, task, or contract is that it is very time consuming.

This is a great way to formally establish your success and the areas you need to work on in later units.

Links

I used SurveyMonkey to evaluate my class last term, check out http://www.surveymonkey.com/TakeATour.aspx for more information.

The survey I used for my class looked like http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5GG3ZKS

And the results looked like http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9402699/MySurvey_Responses.pdf

Have a look at the below paper for a great description of the differences between summative and formative assessment http://www.nmsa.org/Publications/WebExclusive/Assessment/tabid/1120...

Wikipedia has a great definition and general information about evaluation at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation