Comprehensive and continuous evaluation: meaning, advantages, and disadvantages

Comprehensive and continuous evaluation evaluates the examinee – student or employee – throughout the entire learning process. This facilitates the assessment of their knowledge and acquired skills and is an excellent method for testing the improvement of academic performance and job performance.

Both reasons are sufficiently well-founded for us to explain precisely what comprehensive and continuous evaluation is and how it works.

What is a comprehensive and continuous evaluation?

The meaning of continuous and comprehensive evaluation it’s pretty simple: it’s a pedagogical tool to accompany learning and the development of competencies that can be used in the academic, training, and work environment. 

This type of assessment places the person being assessed at the center, adapting to their pace, needs, and characteristics to achieve a series of goals set at the beginning of the process.

In the specific context of Human Resources, continuous evaluation allows to carry out the performance evaluation constantly, being one of the essential pillars in the talent retention strategies of the companies.

In any case, it is a system of accompaniment that guarantees people’s progress. 

Here are a few other benefits:

• Improves the learning process.
• Returns a higher success rate of the training programs.
• Evaluates the training or performance process as a whole.
• Adapts to the individual in a flexible environment.
• Provides constant feedback.
• Promotes self-evaluation and improvement of habits and methods.
• It helps to prepare for the final or annual evaluation.
• Increases employability by developing the professional profile. 
• Encourages specialization.
• Allows the creation of a shared learning community.

We will go deeper into some of its characteristics to understand what continuous assessment means.

Characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages of comprehensive and continuous evaluation

Continuous evaluation is oriented to the knowledge of the processes and the products or results of the same. 

In this way, the student or person under examination must be able to verify their mistakes to correct them without negatively affecting the conclusion. 

In the new pedagogical methodologies, errors are an essential source of learning by allowing the person to discover why they made the error, what it consisted of and how they can correct it. 

The trainer adopts a more active role since he implements actions to correct mistakes and review or reinforce weak points in addition to sharing his knowledge. 

This allows him to assign complementary activities and to observe the students individually. 

The main principles of continuous and comprehensive evaluation imply that it should be:

• Comprehensive.
• Flexible.
• Participative. 
• Positive.
• Integrative.
• Coherent.

In addition, it should encourage feedback, an indispensable condition for ensuring the necessary adjustments to the methods of all those involved. 

Thus, a climate of continuous improvement of the individual towards personal and professional development is established.

Disadvantages of continuous and comprehensive evaluation: the workload for teachers

Continuous evaluation means that the teacher has to correct a large amount of work to make the student see how they are doing in the subject. It also helps the teacher to see if there is some evolution and improvement.

Therefore, a comprehensive and continuous evaluation is a more significant burden on teachers than a single assessment, which only involves marking an exam in most cases.

Tools and resources for continuous evaluation

A commitment to quality governs comprehensive and continuous assessment, so it must offer pedagogical experiences adapted to the needs of students from an innovative dynamic. 

To achieve this, you can use some of these resources:

• Checklist for teachers to carry out complementary quick, punctual evaluations.
• Inverted or flipped classrooms focus on learning by doing and not memorizing.
• Class notebook.
• Masterclasses or masterclasses.
• Group dynamics.
• Debates to generate group dynamics.
• Practical work.
• Problem-solving.
• Individual and joint projects to improve interrelationships.
• Direct observation.

There are many other tools that you can use to develop your continuous educational program without forgetting the relevance of the initial organization based on personalized objectives and criteria.

How does a continuous evaluation work?

The success of continuous assessment lies not only in the timing of its application but also in the correct definition of the objectives to be achieved, the methodology applied, and the tools for continuous monitoring and analysis. 

These are the six steps to be taken into account in the continuous assessment process:

1. Establishment of learning objectives considering the starting knowledge. 
2. Creation of key performance indicators and evaluation criteria.
3. Selection of assessment tools and techniques. 
4. Implementation of the educational environment in which objective evidence of the level of achievement is generated.
5. Collection of evidence of learning and academic parameterization for program adaptation.
6. Final evaluation.

To achieve greater objectivity in the evaluation process, you can resort to technological tools such as e-learning programs and software that include, as an added value, the exhaustive evaluation of even large groups of students.   

Pedagogical use of technology to enhance outcomes

The pedagogical use of technology is a strategic resource as long as it is carried out with foresight and anticipation. 

It benefits from complementary tools such as controlling plagiarism of papers and tests or possible fraud in online exams.

According to the time in which they performed, there are three types of evaluation:

• Initial.
• Continuous.
• Final. 

In all these phases, to determine a grade according to the degree of achievement and quality, it is necessary to establish the goals from the first moment, and the evaluation criteria are considered essential. 

The latter must be objectively, reasonably quantifiable, and accessible to those evaluated.

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