Master Monitoring and Evaluation in 5 Minutes

This article is concerned with the basic concepts and nature of monitoring and evaluation. We focus attention on the meaning of monitoring and evaluation. We shall however, also guide you through the nature of evaluation emphasizing the importance as well as the purposes of evaluation.

MEANING OF MONITORING AND EVALUATION

What is Monitoring?

In simple terms, monitoring refers to watching or checking on a person, things or objects in order to warn or admonish. It entails warning about faults or informing one in respect of his duty. Monitoring could also mean giving advice and instruction by way of reproof or caution. It can be said to mean keeping order in a particular situation.

Monitoring can be defined as collecting information at regular intervals about ongoing projects or programmes within the school system, concerning the nature and level of their performance. Regular monitoring provides basis for judging the impact of inputs that have been fed into the system,

What Is Evaluation?

Evaluation is the determination of the value of a thing. It is the formal determination of the quality, value or effectiveness of a programme, project or process is primarily concerned with measuring the impact of input the quality of people’s lives.

Educational programmes have intended outcomes. They have plans that are being followed in order to achieve these outcomes. These plans consist of a range of components working together to ensure their successful implementation. It is by monitoring plans and evaluating their outcome once completed that educators seek to ensure that they are being accountable to their stake-holders (parents, government, students and society), true to their intentions, and that they themselves will learn from past experience of the programme for further work they might do.

Evaluation For What?

Evaluation of the educational Organization and programme is one of the most difficult and most important phases of educational administration. Evaluations are constantly being sought by various individuals or groups. The parents and members of the public want to know how good their schools are. The government must make continual judgments regarding the schools as such judgments are basic for the establishment or review of the various policies adopted by the government.

The administrators are not in a position to make recommendations in the desirable developments in the school system unless they have available the results of evaluations. Teachers also are interested in evaluation, in order that they may have some knowledge of the results of their efforts. Their morale is highly related to the understandings that they have in respect of the smooth running of the school system of which they are a part. In view of the foregoing, you can see that evaluation is inevitable in order to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of the school system.

The Nature and Importance of Monitoring

Monitoring is concerned with whether a project or programme is implemented in a manner that is consistent with its design. In other words, in monitoring we are interested in determining if the inputs were delivered at the times and in the quantities envisaged by the plan; if activities occurred qualitatively and quantitatively in the manner prescribed by the plan; if resources were expended at the times and levels outlined in the plan; and, if the individuals and communities targeted by the plan were the ones who were actually served by the project.

Monitoring is important for many reasons, some of which are described here:

• It enables us to describe the programme we will subsequently evaluate. If we do not know the degree to which it is implemented, it is difficult to arrive at conclusions about the adequacy of that programme.
• It is a powerful tool for programme managers who wish to determine the specific “nuts and bolts” they must address in order to improve a project’s impact.
• It is an essential element of accountability to counterparts, employers and colleagues.

The Nature of Evaluation

Monitoring is a prerequisite for successful project valuing. Monitoring and evaluation are two activities which support each other and enable stakeholders to make informed decisions about a project’s future. Essentially evaluation is ultimately concerned with the worth and value of a project or programme. However such judgments are made in the context of programmed operations.

For example, if a State Government in the country decides to supply free lunch to its students in its Day Secondary Schools, we may wish to know whether the students learn more or become better nourished? Thus, evaluation is concerned with the “so what” of inputs, that is, the long – term changes that a particular project helps bring about in the behaviours and conditions of those whom it touches.

From the data generated through monitoring and evaluation, one may decide to do either of the following:

• discontinue the project if it is beset with basic faults that can not be easily solved,
• revise the project’s design.
• continue the project with no changes.

You should note that monitoring and evaluation are continuous activities. They occur throughout the life of a programme.

Importance of Evaluation

The significance of evaluation in educational management lies in the fact that evaluation is the springboard on which the future development of education and the entire school system repose. Parents, students, members of the public, teachers, government and administrators have their views and judgments with respect to the strengths and limitations of given schools or school systems.

Educational administrators recognize that evaluation is a part and parcel of their function, however they are often confronted by issues of validity and credibility of data collected as some of these may be inadequate. While it is understood that the task of evaluation is difficult and complex, however, these are no sufficient reasons for failure to recognize its importance in the school system. If a problem arises in the other numerous tasks of the administrator, carrying out an evaluation of the problem area would assist him in no small measure on how to go about solving the problem.

Purposes Of Evaluation

Evaluation is carried out for a variety of purposes. Some of these are listed below:

• To secure the basis for making judgments at the end of a period of operation; for example, at the end of a school term, school year or even a week of school term.
• To ensure continuous, effective and improved programme operation.
• To diagnose difficulties and avoid destructive problems.
• To improve staff and members of the public’s ability to develop the educational system.
• To test new approaches to problems and to conduct pilot studies in the consideration of which advancements and progress can be effected. Essentially, management of schools involves the evaluation of the following educational objectives.
• To evaluate instructional programmes
• To assess students’ progress
• To facilitate students’ progress
• To understand the individual student
• To facilitate self – understanding by students
• To contribute to a knowledge of students’ abilities
• To assist in administrative judgment.
• Let us take a brief look at each one of these.
• To evaluate instructional programme

The evaluation of instructional programmes is compulsory for both the teacher and the learners to determine the causes of poor learning situation. It could be that the objectives are not realistic; methods of teaching may be ineffective; examination tests may be too hard or inadequate; or that specific characteristics of the students had resulted in poor performance.

To assess students’ progress: A student needs to know when he is making progress in his learning and when he is not in order to help him improve,

To facilitate students’ progress: In daily, weekly and long term learning tasks, the teacher should ascertain how well the student is learning and on this basis to award him a grade or a rating.

To understand the individual student: Various interest inventories and academic aptitude tests should be used to facilitate the evaluation of the student’s abilities in the cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains.

To facilitate self-understanding by students: The impact of school on the student’s life is crucial on his later life. By the time students finish secondary school, they are expected to set realistic goals and evaluate their progress towards these goals. This depends however, on teacher-student collection of information about ability and the teachers task of interpreting such information to them if the student is to achieve self-understanding,

To contribute to knowledge of students’ abilities: The improvement in the teaching – learning process can be better induced through an increased knowledge of abilities and instructions,

To assist in administrative judgment: We need to know which of the students shall be retained in a particular class; who shall we promote; and who shall we give accelerated promotion. In addition we need to know the student’s mental state of fitness.

Types of Evaluation.

Evaluation uses inquiry and judgment methods including:

• determining standards for judging quality and deciding whether those standards should be relative or absolute;
• collecting relevant information;
• applying the standards to determine quality.

There are four dimensions to evaluation: the formative and the summative, the internal and the external dimensions.

Formative evaluation is conducted during the operation of a programme to provide the programme managers with evaluative information that are useful in improving the programme. For example, if we are developing a curriculum package, formative evaluation would involve inspection of the curriculum content by subject experts, pilot tests with small number of students, field tests with larger number of students and teachers in several schools and so on, Each stage would result in immediate feedback to the developers who would use the information to make necessary revisions.

Summative evaluation is conducted at the end of a programme to provide potential consumers with judgments about the programme’s worth or merit. For example, after the curriculum package is completely developed, a summative evaluation might be conducted to determine how effective the package is with a national sample of typical schools, teachers, and students at the level for which it was developed. The findings of the summative evaluation would then be made available to consumers.

You would note that the audiences and uses for these two evaluation roles are very different. In formative evaluation, the audience is programme personnel, that is, in our example they are those responsible for developing the curriculum.

Summative evaluation audiences include potential consumers such as students, teachers, and other professionals, funding agents such tax payers, and supervisors and other officials as well as programme personnel. Formative evaluation leads to decisions about programme development including modification, revision and the likes. Summative evaluation leads to decisions concerning programme continuation, termination, expansion, adoption and so on.

You should be aware that both formative and summative evaluation are essential because decisions are needed during the initial, developmental stages of a programme so as to improve and strengthen it, and again, when it has stabilized, to judge its final worth or determine its future. Unfortunately, many educators conduct only summative evaluation.

This is unfortunate because the development process, without formative evaluation, is incomplete and inefficient. Try to imagine a situation in which a new aircraft design was developed and submitted to a summative fest flight without first testing it in the “formative” wind tunnel. Educational test flights can be expensive too, especially when we do not have a clue about the probability of success.

Evaluation may also be classified as either internal or external. An internal evaluation is one conducted by the programme employees, and an external evaluation is one conducted by outsiders. An experimental remedial programme in a secondary school may be evaluated by a member of the school staff (internal evaluation) or by a team of inspectors from the school’s Zonal Education Office (external evaluation), These two types of evaluation have advantages and disadvantages some of which are listed below:

The internal evaluator surely knows more about the programme than an outsider, however this closeness to the programme may make her not to be completely objective in her judgment of the programme.

It is difficult for an external evaluator to learn as much about the programme as the insider knows,

Sometimes, an internal evaluator may have unimportant details about the programme but overlooks several critical factors,

The internal evaluator may be familiar with important contextual information that would tamper with evaluation recommendations.