Making evaluative decisions about their own and others' work
To what extent do students on your course have formal opportunities to make explicit evaluative judgements about their own and others’ work on your course?
Why?
- Self-regulation by definition means that students - not just teachers - are making judgements about their work, its production and its outcomes
- Making evaluative decisions develops critical thinking, a primary goal of university education
- Evaluative judgement- and decision-making are involved in all higher order abilities such as selecting pertinent information for a task, determining the strength of an argument, formulating a research question, drawing conclusions from evidence etc.
- Evaluating work improves understanding of content as it involves interrogation of that content
- Students are already regulating their learning, but some are better than others, giving practice will develop the skills of all students and particularly weaker students
- Making evaluative decisions gives students a sense of control over their learning
How to begin
- Students provide an abstract with an assignment submission: to do this they must stand back and identify what they have written. An abstract also helps you to see what students think is important and may make it easier to understand what they have written.
- Students provide written explanation of the concepts underpinning a problem they are working on or about the elegance of different solution pathways
- You provide some good quality reports from a previous year and ask students to order them from best to least good, including their own, with reasons for their ranking
- Students evaluate and provide feedback on the work of peers who have completed an assignment in the same topic domain
- Students produce a group poster on a complex topic and hang it in class, then all students individually walk around and add a written feedback comment (e.g. an alternative viewpoint, a suggestion for improvement, a creative addition). Note that students learn as much, if not more, from evaluating and producing comments than the group do from their receipt.