Instructional Evaluation: Current Issues and Future Directions.

The future of instructional evaluation will probably involve responding to changes in the goals of both teaching and evaluating teachers. The inadequacies of student achievement tests as measures of educational effectiveness will lead to a shift of interest away from tests and toward the abilities of students to solve problems, use learning strategies successfully, and structure knowledge. Examination of the methods teachers use to develop these abilities in students, as well as to motivate students, should be a central feature of evaluation in the future. Evaluation itself can be improved by increasing the amount of data upon which evaluations are based, including data generated by the teachers themselves; developing more reliable systems for obtaining students ' responses to instruction; and maintaining a positive tone in evaluations to provide encouragement to teachers. The future of evaluation will also turn on the effects of evaluation processes on institutions in their entirety, including the effects of frequency of evaluation and the effects of evaluating teachers as opposed to curricula. (PGD) Reproductions supplied by EMS are the best that can be made from the original document.