The Role of Evaluation in Vocational Education Essay Example

that the resulting information can be used to determine whether your organization or program is effectively carrying out planned activities, and the extent to which it is achieving its stated objectives and anticipated results.

Managers or school administrators can and should conduct internal evaluations to get information about their programs so that they can make sound decisions about the implementation of those programs. Internal evaluation should be conducted on an ongoing basis and applied conscientiously by administrators at every level of an organization in all program areas. In addition, all of the program's participants (Administrative personnel, External personnel, Teachers and students) should be involved in the evaluation process in appropriate ways.

This collaboration helps ensure that the evaluation is fully participatory and builds commitment on the part of all involved to use the results to make critical program improvements. Although most evaluations are done internally, conducted by and for program managers and staff, there is still a need for larger-scale, external evaluations conducted periodically by individuals from outside the program or organization.

Most often these external evaluations are required for funding purposes or to answer questions about the program's long-term impact by looking at changes in demographic indicators such as graduation rate or performance of students. In addition, occasionally a manager may request an external evaluation to assess programmatic or operating problems that have been identified but that cannot be fully diagnosed or resolved through the findings of internal evaluation. Program evaluation, conducted on a regular basis, can greatly improve the administration and effectiveness of an institute and its programs.

To do so requires understanding the differences between monitoring, research and evaluation, making evaluation an

integral part of regular program planning and implementation, and collecting the different types of information needed by managers at different levels of the organization. Research, Evaluation and Monitoring. The main difference between research, evaluation and monitoring is that research is usually conducted with the intent to generalize the findings from a sample to a larger population.

Evaluation, on the other hand, usually focuses on an internal situation, such as collecting data about specific programs, with no intent to generalize the results to other settings and situations while monitoring, though different from them go hand in hand and are usually taken together. Monitoring is basically getting aware of a system, people or an organization. It is observing a certain situation for any changes that occur over a period of time. In other words, research generalizes, evaluation particularizes and monitoring observe.

What Is Evaluation? As defined by the American Evaluation Association, evaluation involves assessing the strengths and weaknesses of programs, policies, personnel, products, and organizations to improve their effectiveness. -Wiki Evaluation is the process of determining significance or worth, usually by careful appraisal and study. Evaluation is the analysis and comparison of actual progress vs. prior plans, oriented toward improving plans for future implementation.

It is part of a continuing management process consisting of planning, implementation, and evaluation; ideally with each following the other in a continuous cycle until successful completion of the activity. Evaluation is the process of determining the worth or value of something. This involves assigning values to the thing or person being evaluated. Evaluation in education according to Okoro M. O. (2000) involves the collection of data and the use of such data

to assess the effectiveness or quality of a program or performance.

From these definitions of evaluation, one can see that evaluation has an important role to play in the sustainability and successful operation of vocational-technical education programs in our institutions of learning. Below, is an overview of the steps of a "typical" evaluation process. The Main Roles of Evaluations People working in the field of program evaluation have attempted to summarise this wide range of roles into categories so that it is easier to write about and discuss evaluation purposes.