A Framework for Appraising Education

Appraisal is the major performance management tool that is widely used to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of education in different contexts. In the European education environment, it has been recognized that the transition from learning to learning outcomes relies on developing appraisal frameworks that can appraise what a student knows, understands and mainly how to utilize what he has learned, as well as on evaluation frameworks of programs and in general of the educational approach. This paper has two main objectives. Firstly, it critically reviews the extant literature on student/program appraisal of the European education. Secondly, based on that review it presents a common framework for student assessment and program evaluation, which relies on four pedagogical issues: The PRACTICE applied, focusing on the students’ knowledge achieved and on the design of the educational approach; the TOOL utilized that concerns the data collection and the data base creation; and the APPROACH in appraising, which includes the analyses performed and the time to materialize them. These three are creating a three-dimensional space, within which any aspect of the fourth issue, the NATURE of both the student assessment and the project evaluation, can take any position in this three-dimensional space.