Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2015 number 2

My reflections are focused on both the epistemological and educational dimensions of evaluation. In this view I’m looking for some answers to questions like the followings: in which kind of knowledge-theory has to be included the evaluation?, which is the function to be assigned to the evaluation?, who evaluates and from what point of view? When evaluation becomes a professional performance aimed at assessing a program, it makes ends and means separated and the main value, which works as criterion for evaluation appears to be the success of a product. Such kind of evaluation is applied from the outside on selected outcomes of a whole process and reveals its positivistic roots. On the contrary, when considered from the inside of the process, evaluation assumes different meanings and functions. If this is the case, it works as a “game”, a social practice that becomes capable of self-evaluation, once the course of reflection is set going. In this perspective, evaluation appears as nothing but one side of the inquiry going on and, as far as its general direction, it will accord with a constructivist epistemology. At the end, evaluation expresses on the whole the caring-side of thinking, either as appraising (weighing up) or as prizing (assigning value) attitude. As far as the educational scenario is concerned, both evaluation from the outside and form the inside are operating within the majority of school systems. It is clear that the outside evaluation is prevailing with centralized and bureaucratic school systems, which prefer uniform and formal curricula. On the contrary, it is the inside evaluation which better helps to reach the results when adopting curricula that pay attention to local needs and, moreover, are sensitive to psychological (personal differences) and sociological (specificity of contexts) variables.