Evaluation without Tears

Teachers evaluate students’ work constantly. It is a built-in part of the job of teaching. Yet, what is hardly acknowledged is the subjectivity and unfairness of evaluation. Although grades and marks have long been discounted as having any reliability or validity, they endure as real and exact measures of ability and performance. Not only are they specious, they have little or nothing to do with the important goal of evaluation – that is to provide feedback to learners that enables their subsequent growth. Evaluation Without Tears provides teachers with specific examples of how they might provide evaluative feedback to students that is enabling and affirming, rather than punishing, respectful of the learner and protective of the learner’s dignity, recognizing that one person’s judgment is not truth. Teaching students to self-assess, an important dimension of growth and maturity, is a significant feature of the book.