The Relationship between Assessment and Evaluation - Essay Example

Learning is not a directly observable quantity and requires explorative initiatives to ascertain. As a result, assessment reports on applied standards, describing the standards as applied in the learning process. It, therefore, forms a basis for determining the existence and the level of accountability in the learning process (Popham, 2011).

It is however not always fair to use assessment to determine accountability because the approach largely relies on two factors, the teacher’s responsibility, and the learner’s responsibility and it is, however, difficult to identify and quantify each party’s responsibility in a learning process. Assessment may therefore not determine each party’s exact level of accountability (Popham, 2011).

The relationship between assessment and evaluation is their common scope of obtaining information about a subject. The two processes are however different concerning the extent of their scopes. While assessment aims at obtaining information about a subject, evaluation extends beyond the acquisition of information and aims at deciding on the subject’s value. An assessment can for example be used to observe a subject while an evaluation can be used in conducting a test to qualify a subject (Popham, 2011). Read More