3/18/08 Reading Summary
While reading all of the articles for this week, I couldn’t help but think about the value of evaluations. They play a very important role in so many different fields and can hold such strong meaning. They can help someone re-evaluate their work, access how someone is progressing at their job, or assist in redesigning programs of various natures.
I started thinking during my reading of what evalutations have ment to me over time. At first I resorted to the obvious nature of evaluations, which is in the workforce. We are constantly being evaluated at work and if we’re not, then we probably should be. Evaluations in the workplace help determine our learning progression, give us an idea of our strengths and weaknesses, and lead our development in a direction of improvement. They allow us as workers to gain a different perspective of our work habit than our own. Although we may not do our own evaluations in our careers, and may not always agree with the evaluators comments, we have to understand the beneficial factor of evaluating,
Then the next thing that came to mind concerning evaluations, was just the small but constant evaluations we make on our everyday lives. Are we doing the right with our lives? Am I at the right job? Should this be my major? We are constantly asking ourselves questions and evaluating our personal moves almost everyday. We all have our own way of evaluating the choices we make throughout life, and what we typically ask ourselves isn’t too far off from what an evaluator may ask of a trainer’s program.
The articles we read this week all in some form or fashion stressed the important use of evalutaions. They have been in use for quite some time now and if done correctly can be very effective. It is vital to create and complete an evaluation in a very developed and unbiased manner. As discussed in parts of the articles, bad evaluations and evaluators can create unnessesary conflict. However, if executed correctly can almost always produce positive outcomes.