Evaluation

Domain 6: Evaluation, Inquiry and Knowledge Building for Improvement and Innovation

Evaluation, including professional inquiry, enables the creation and sharing of new knowledge and understandings about what works and makes a bigger difference for all learners.

Evaluation involves making a judgment about the quality, effectiveness or value of a policy, programme or practice in terms of its contribution to the desired outcomes. It involves systematically posing questions, gathering evidence, and making sense of this evidence: ‘what is and is not working and for whom?’

By enabling us to describe and understand the impacts of our current practices, evaluation also highlights the implications for equity and excellence and provides a basis for determining actions for improvement.

Professional inquiry is an integral part of the evaluation process. It involves identifying an aspect of practice that is cause for concern, asking the right questions, and then seeking evidence and information to be able to better understand the issues involved and respond effectively.

The New Zealand Curriculum and Te Marautanga o Aotearoa both describe teaching as a process of inquiry and emphasise the importance of leaders and teachers developing the expertise to inquire into their practice, evaluate its impact on student outcomes, and build organisational and system knowledge about what works.

A learning community’s capacity to engage with, learn through, and use external evaluation, depends on its capacity to ‘do and use’ internal evaluation, inquiry and knowledge building for improvement and innovation.

The organisational conditions that support this capacity include:

1. evaluation leadership
2. a learning-oriented community of professionals that takes agency in using evaluation for improvement in practice and outcomes
3. opportunity to develop technical evaluation expertise (including access to external expertise)
4. access to, and use of, appropriate tools and methods
5. systems, processes and resources that support purposeful data gathering, knowledge building and decision making.

In effective schools, evaluation, inquiry and knowledge building processes are purposeful and focus on a specific area for improvement. They work together coherently, enabling the use of relevant information at student, classroom, teacher and school levels to promote improvement.