The Main Areas in Assessment of The Programs in Schools
In an academic program, we can not separate the parts in evaluation because its effectiveness goes hand in hand with the educators, students, owners, and staff of school behavior, efforts, and perspectives. However, the raters of knowledge to report it is workable results and solutions theoretically and practically are important. The focused areas in a program assessment should act through a compound of the schools' departments, faculties, students, and staff intersecting and interfering with the objective outcomes.
To assess a program, evaluators should know the program professionally and its pursuit. A definition of a program denotes a set of explicit activities planned for intentional actions with markable goals and purposes (Spaulding, 2014, p. 5). I extend this definition to the educational systems that a program invites the students to change their behaviors according to the related subject.
Part of evaluating the purposes is watching the level of changes in students' skilled behaviors, mindsets of decision making, and social participation after graduation in an educational scheme. Depending on subjects, collecting and analyzing data should show changes in the students' behaviors before and after the program. This process would be attainable when evaluators measure the level of each student's success and achievements toward the expected behavior. Meanwhile, students should be part of the evaluator team to be listened to; however, other stakeholders' opinions are essential in this assessment too. According to Tayler and Magurie (1965), five groups are eligible to be asked for their perspectives in the evaluation of an educational program: “spokesmen for society at large volume, subject-matter experts, teachers, parents, and the students” (as cited in stake, 1967, p. 8) that absence of each of them can change the results.
In vocational schools, behaviors change relate to the learned skills by the students and will execute confidently in the workplace. However, the learners' knowledge close to the subjects makes remarkable in the outcomes. Some of the students at the first site might require to pass some prerequisite courses or programs to be eligible for the desired program. For example, in vocational schools, ICTs are the main subject for many adult learners who have challenging new technological responsibilities. Therefore, part of the focused area in evaluation lies in the level of students' previous knowledge related to the courses that affect the expected behavior after graduation. However, attention to the peers' feedback regarding their experience with the school would enhance the evaluation results. In this regard, examiners should consider the quality of formative assessments essentially the duration of the program and the knowledge and behaviors of instructors in the learning process.
The professional actions of the evaluators and independency also alter the results. In evaluating a program, talking with participants is a sensitive ground. Investigators should care about ethical behaviors and temper of language during interactions and in reports. Their language tones should be lacking harmful words to hurt the participants' feelings or whose situations and positions would change as the results of the evaluations (Spaulding, 2014). Moreover, they should control the data collecting and analysis process to decrease human errors in biases. My main point is the investigators should act as project managers, watching the conditions that led to prejudgments. Discriminations and condemns behind misjudgments and unfair opinions lack truth, facts, and evidence would distort the results of assessments.
The inspectors should judge, but their judgments would be clear reports that explain the program weaknesses according to evidence, logical thoughts, and comparisons with accepted standards for evaluation and quantitative measured results. Formal educational evaluation would be valid when approved its dependency on checklists, peers' structured visitations, controlled comparisons, and standards of students' tests (stake, 1967).
In conclusion, evaluating an educational program would not be a simple action to be rewarded for the organizations. I am an educator who would contribute to the assessment of a program if required. In an evaluating program, several factors are important; however, schools' purposes for evaluating a program would be accountability in the society and improvement of the programs' capacities for the knowledgeable students as their outcomes.