Week 6: Evaluation and Problems Faced While Using Littlejohn's Checklist

At the beginning, I filled with regret for having the thought of it is good for us to use Littlejohn’s detailed evaluation checklist to evaluate two chapters of the material/ course book. One more problem appeared when we started to evaluate the course book, which was there were more tasks than we thought. We thought that task is refer to the sub-topics of a main topic such as Unit 1, 2, 3 and so on. But, we were wrong. There were also ‘sections’ under Unit 1, 2, 3 and so on. Hence, we have around 40 tasks to evaluate for each chapters.

Since there are five members in a group, we have different opinions to define the sub-sections of the tasks when we evaluate the two chapters in course book. It was very hard for us to define all the sub-sections but we found out a solution for the problem which is we just evaluate the tasks based on our own interpretations.

In this tutorial, I have my very first experience in materials evaluation. This detailed analysis at the level of tasks aid pre-service teacher like me in teacher’s professional development. In my opinion, teachers analyse materials to enable them to understand the content and details of the materials before they teach and also take more control over the design and use of the materials when they are teaching.

All in all, teacher has the great responsibility in materials evaluation.