Some weeks ago, in our Didactics class, we talked about evaluation and that made me realized how difficult can be for teachers to evaluate their students. How can a teacher know if their students are learning the contents? How can we let our students know their progress without making them feel down if it isn’t what they expected? The way of evaluation has always consisted in teachers preparing an exam to evaluate their students’ knowledge. They will be a number between 0 and 10 and that will determine what they know but, it isn’t about that. Every person is different from one another, and we shouldn’t evaluate them the same way.
Students shouldn’t be considered as numbers, but as people who can achieve great things. Unfortunately, so many talented students got lost on the road just because of a number. Students can know the contents, but they can also have bad days while being evaluated getting bad results, that doesn’t mean they don’t know the concepts. Most people care about the results, but not how you got there.
Luckily, things are changing. We have already realized that the human being is extraordinary and unique, that there exist multiple intelligences, and that evaluating competencies and contents is much better than evaluating only contents.
When it comes to finding the best way for evaluating students, I can’t think of only one way to do it, but of a combination of multiple ones so, what is the best one then? All of them. There is no right or wrong when evaluating, but we should consider other processes too, not just exams. Fortunately, nowadays teachers count with more tools to assess students in the best possible way being fair, but also flexible.
In the end what it really matters is how our students learn and what they learn, and we should care less about the number because that is all what it is, a number that, in some cases, doesn’t represent the reality.
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