Transformative Curriculum Chapter 4
Transformative Curriculum Evaluation

What is Curriculum Evaluation?

Transformative evaluation involves more than obtaining test scores on students' achievement.  It means inquiring deeply into the nature and qualities of curriculum so that educators can support the ongoing problem-solving and decision-making processes of curriculum design, planning, and enactment.

Approaches to curriculum

Five important questions:

1. Who decides what will be assessed?
2. What questions are to be answered?
3. How might data be gathered and analyzed?
4. What criteria will be used to interpret and judge data?
5. Who analyzes data, makes judgments, and uses judgments?

The Mainstream Approach

Evaluation and content experts and national or state panels of selected teachers are the primary decision makers.

The development of independent thought, caring, and democratic development are not the focus of curriculum assessment.  The primary focus is student academic achievement.

Objective and standardized tests are the dominant forms of data gathering.

Effectiveness- the extent to which standards are met.

Teachers use the data to identify what standards/objectives students are having difficulty with and use data to determine grades.

The Transformative Approach

Students, teachers, administrators, parents, and community members are active participants in determining which national and state standards have priority.

Assessment questions focus on:

1. quality of curriculum plans and practices
2. quality of students' school lives
3. quality of student learning

Evaluators use both quantitative and qualitative forms of inquiry to obtain data about curriculum work and student learning

Criteria:

1. Technical indicators such as balance, clarity, efficiency, and effectiveness
2. Pedagogical criteria such as developmental appropriateness, explanatory power of the content
3. Critical indicators such as accessibility for all students, nondiscrimination, alternative forms of interpretation

Every one involved in curriculum design and planning should be involved in analyzing and judging the data

Transformative curriculum evaluation includes three key aspects:

The Process of Transformative Curriculum Evaluation

Evaluation Curriculum Design

Evaluative inquiry-  examining the curriculum in place and its implicit platform.

Everyone involved in the design work needs to assess the work in process and in retrospect.

Gathering data to describe a design groups' deliberations involves observing and recording each of the meetings.

Data can be obtained by tape recording sessions and then typing transcripts for analysis.

Analyzing raw data includes identifying specific design issues:

Criteria are statements that describe sought-after qualities

Criteria involved in transformative evaluation require the consideration and interpretation of the elements present, the difficulty of the elements, and the complexity of the relationships among the elements.

Design group members could use the data to adjust deliberative processes and the design statement

Faculty and the community may chose to keep the design as is, revise the design to meet the criteria, or discard the design.

Evaluating Curricular Planning

The design should affirm what is centrally important and stimulate teaching artistry

The important players in such evaluation are the teachers themselves.

Consider these questions as you prepare to evaluate curriculum planning:

The forms of inquiry used to obtain or reveal data about planning can include the following:

In most cases, the teachers who are planning the curriculum will also have been part of designing it.

Evaluating Curriculum Enactments and Classroom Environments

Each teacher brings his own beliefs, images, and routines to curriculum and should examine and reflect on his own curriculum constructs, planning, and enactments.

As faculty members analyze and interpret data, they must repeatedly ask themselves these questions:

1. Does this portray students engaged in the kinds of learning activities we had in mid as we designed and planned this curriculum?
2. Are these activities and patterns of student engagement congruent with our assumptions and principles of learning?
3. Do the data portray active engagements, student inquiry and the ability to create meaning, caring relationships, and mutual respect by all?

Teachers and school administrators are the primary players in analyzing, judging, and using those judgments about the quality of curriculum enactments and classroom environment

Summative evaluation-  examination of the effects and outcomes of all of the preceding curriculum work.

Dominant approach is through standards-based achievement tests.

Much of what these tests measure has little curricular worth.

These tests cannot respond to may of the recently established national standards.

Students, faculty members, parents, and community members all have a vested interest in the assessment of student learning and other outcomes.

Some available forms of assessment:

Students must be active agents in analyzing and judging their own learning.

Teachers are involved in these assessment processes.

Managing a Comprehensive Curriculum Evaluation Plan

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Notes taken from:

Henderson, J.G. & Hawthorne, R. D. (2000). Transformative curriculum leadership (2nd). Upper Saddle River: Merrill.