Importance of monitoring and evaluating learners progress

Having ways to check on your progress (monitoring) and take stock of where things are at on a regular basis (evaluation), are important for your group to function effectively. 

Monitoring and evaluation are critical for taking stock of progress and for helping to ‘learn as we go’.  Monitoring and evaluation can help groups to identify issues, measure success and learn from any mistakes.  This notion is closely linked to the ‘learning’ principle of successful community conservation projects.

You can use this worksheet for step-by-step guidance on how to plan your evaluation.  Work through the questions, fill in the worksheet as you go and refer back to these sections for ideas.

Monitoring

Monitoring is the systematic gathering and analysing of information that will help measure progress on an aspect of your project.  Ongoing checks against progress over time may include monitoring water quality in a catchment or monetary expenditure against the project budget.   Monitoring is not evaluation as such but is usually a critical part of your evaluation process and should therefore be included at your project planning stage. 

Before undertaking any monitoring it is important to consider:

Why you want to monitor?

Keeping records and monitoring activities helps people see progress and builds a sense of achievement.  Records can be useful and even essential when promoting the group or applying for funding.

Monitoring also has significance for the wider field of conservation.  Ecosystem monitoring is not a fully developed science, so any work undertaken by your group has the potential to contribute to the refinement of measures of ecosystem health.

What you will monitor

The following list of questions will help you decide on your monitoring objectives:

• What information will help us make informed decisions? What will help us know that our project/group is on track?
• What’s the appropriate scale for monitoring e.g. catchment, district, reserve boundary, whole forest or whole ecosystem?
• What are our timeframes for monitoring e.g. days, months or years?
• Do we need input from other groups or agencies?

Features of effective monitoring

Monitoring can be considered to be effective when:

• Scientifically valid techniques are used.
• Aspects relevant to your project are measured.
• It’s carried out regularly and consistently.
• Accurate records are kept.
• It is used as part of your evaluation to support or adjust project goals and actions. 

Evaluation

Evaluation provides an opportunity to reflect and learn from what you’ve done, assess the outcomes and effectiveness of a project and think about new ways of doing things.  In other words, it informs your future actions. 

Evaluation should ideally be factored into your initial project planning (see setting your direction).  When you are setting your vision, goals and actions, you need to be considering how and when you’ll check your progress against them.   You may decide that you will:

• Refine your project as you go, so that evaluation is part of your regular project activities.
• Evaluate the project at agreed milestones e.g. on a yearly basis or after major activities.
• Carry out an initial baseline exercise against which you compare progress at the end of the project.

To ensure your evaluation is effective, it is important to consider:

• Your purpose - what to evaluate
• Your approach - how to evaluate

Once evaluation data has been gathered and analysed, remember to check your conclusions against your goals and objectives.  Make sure you put your results into practice - take them on board and use them to influence how you work! 

Your purpose - what to evaluate

When designing your evaluation, make sure you’re clear about your purpose.  It’s helpful to determine what questions you want answered - make sure everything you ask or investigate during evaluation relates back to these questions. 

As a first step, decide what it is that’s important to evaluate.  It might just be finding out what worked and what didn’t, so you can improve things.  It might be more specific, such as the extent to which your project is achieving the outcomes set for it (in most cases, these will be conservation outcomes), how well organised you are or whether you met the expectations of sponsors.

Your approach - how to evaluate

There are many different ways to evaluate your project, depending on what your purpose is.  However, it’s important to make sure the evaluation process involves valid and sound methods for information gathering and analysis.  This doesn’t mean you need to go to great expense but requires that you be clear about the methods involved. 

A small project, for example, could be evaluated using a well-structured workshop at an evening meeting attended by all project partners.  In comparison, a large, expensive multi-year project might warrant employing a specialist or at least getting their help with the evaluation design.

Next

Assess the impact of the project

Related links

Today, people may have several different careers in the course of their lives. Skills that can be transferred from one field to another, also known as “soft”or transversal skills, are therefore becoming more and more important. Education at every level needs to pay more attention to developing and evaluating those skills.

When I embarked on a journey to research learning processes relating to a specific transversal skill (ethics), I looked into different types of taxonomy (classification of categories) and happened to stumble upon an article about SOLO – the Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome taxonomy. To my embarassment, I had never even heard of it. In the margin of the article, I scribbled “What is this? Find out more!” And I proceeded to look into this topic.

SOLO taxonomy has been around since the early 1980s, when John Biggs and Kevin Collis published a book introducing this approach. While it is generally associated with the evaluation of students’ progress at the university level, the system is so simple that even 5-year-olds can use it to assess their progress based on the rubrics provided by teachers.

SOLO posits five levels of understanding that show how far a learner has progressed:

• At the pre-structural level, the learner has not yet approached the issue in a meaningful way, but is simply repeating the words in the question without understanding them.
• At the unistructural level, the learner has sufficient knowledge to identify, recognise, count, find, label, match, name, and perform simple procedures. The learner has mastered one relevant aspect – dealing with terminology, completing part of the task, defining concepts – but not others.
• At the multistructural level, the learner has understood several aspects but is unable to relate them to one another. The learner can enumerate, describe, illustrate, sequence, select, combine, and follow procedures, but struggles to make connections between them or draw conclusions based on interrelationships.
• At the relational level, relevant aspects are integrated into a coherent structure. The learner is able to address the point and provide explanations, give details, and connect to the whole, offering relevant examples.
• At the extended abstract level, the coherent whole is generalised or re-conceptualised at a higher level of abstraction. The learner grasps a more abstract version of the concept, and recognises other domains to which the concept might be applied.

When SOLO is used for self-evaluation, the instructions and rubrics reflect the level of the learner.

I have used SOLO taxonomy in two contexts. First, I use it at university, to evaluate my material development and teaching, but also to give feedback. Second, I use it at the middle school level, to provide feedback and help students assess their own progress. While SOLO taxonomy may have a number of advantages over other assessment tools, in my view its main advantage is its simplicity. I appreciate the impact it has had on my teaching and assessment, but also on my students’ learning.

“Self-assessment enhances students’ sense of control over their learning and makes them more autonomous learners.”

In my teaching at the university, SOLO guides curriculum and task development as I ask myself whether I am giving my students a chance to perform at every SOLO level. It also allows me to evaluate my students’ development more quickly and efficiently, since I am already able to monitor their progress during meetings and can provide immediate feedback.

With my middle school students, I use SOLO grids to help them evaluate their own progress, and then we compare my evaluation with theirs to see whether the two match. It is clear that the students are getting better at recognising not only where they are, but where they need to go.

Self-assessment enhances students’ sense of control over their learning and makes them more autonomous learners. As educators continue to seek alternative ways of using formative assessment to evaluate learning and teaching, SOLO taxonomy could be a useful tool.