Evaluation is perhaps the most complex and least understood of the terms. Inherent in the idea of
evaluation is "value." When we evaluate, what we are doing is engaging in some process that is
designed to provide information that will help us make a judgment about a given situation. Generally,
any evaluation process requires information about the situation in question. A situation is an umbrella
term that takes into account such ideas as objectives, goals, standards, procedures, and so on. When
we evaluate, we are saying that the process will yield information regarding the worthiness,
appropriateness, goodness, validity, legality, etc., of something for which a reliable measurement or
assessment has been made. For example, I often ask my students if they wanted to determine the
temperature of the classroom they would need to get a thermometer and take several readings at
different spots, and perhaps average the readings. That is simple measuring. The average
temperature tells us nothing about whether or not it is appropriate for learning. In order to do that,
students would have to be polled in some reliable and valid way. That polling process is what
evaluation is all about. A classroom average temperature of 75 degrees is simply information. It is the
context of the temperature for a particular purpose that provides the criteria for evaluation. A
temperature of 75 degrees may not be very good for some students, while for others, it is ideal for
learning. We evaluate every day. Teachers, in particular, are constantly evaluating students, and such
evaluations are usually done in the context of comparisons between what was intended (learning,
progress, behavior) and what was obtained. When used in a learning objective, the definition provided
on the ADPRIMA site for the behavioral verb evaluate is: To classify objects, situations, people,
conditions, etc., according to defined criteria of quality. Indication of quality must be given in the
defined criteria of each class category. Evaluation differs from general classification only in this
respect.