Evaluation & assessment: What's the difference?

The terms evaluation and assessment are often used synonymously, but this leads to a great deal of confusion. Therefore, in this Guide, we will use these terms to mean two very different things. Both evaluation and assessment involve the collection of information to make decisions. However, evaluation is focused on things, e.g., programs, products, and projects. Assessment is focused on people, e.g., their aptitudes, attitudes, or achievement.

This Guide is primarily about evaluation, but assessment is an activity often used within an evaluation. For example, an evaluation intended to inform decisions about whether a digital library should contain only resources that have been scientifically validated might include an assessment of teachers' attitudes toward such resources. Thus, we view assessment as an activity that is often included in evaluations, but it is definitely not the same thing. Assessment is primarily an objective measurement function, whereas evaluation usually involves a much greater degree of subjectivity. The aforementioned assessment may find that teachers don't really care about whether resources have been scientifically validated, and prefer to choose resources based upon intuitive feelings regarding their utility in their classrooms. The decision makers who interpret the evaluation results, on the other hand, may decide that their digital library will only include validated resources because they believe that such a high standard for quality will distinguish it from other collections of resources.