In this article, we will analyse the relationship between educational evaluation and the process by which students acquire knowledge, based on written reports from 390 last year university students. The reports were collected from 1991 through 1994. Through discourse analysis, we sought to explicit the representations the subjects had constructed from their experiences in being evaluated, the meaning contained in such situations as well as to identify the social-educational links, that condition the contradictory movements between learning and evaluating. We also attempted to establish what relations exist between educational evaluation and the larger social context. Our analysis showed the principle of homogenization to be relevant in explaining the research as formulated.
Educational evaluation; assessment representations