Principle 2: Give students practice in 'making evaluative decisions about their own and others' work'

To what extent do students have formal and informal opportunities to evaluate their own or others' work in your course?

Why?

  1. self-regulation by definition means that students are making judgements about their learning not just their teachders
  2. making evaluative decisions develops critical thinking a primary goal of university education 
  3. 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.
  4. evaluating work improves understanding of content as it involves interrogation of content
  5. students are already regulating their learning, only some are better than others, giving practice will develop the skills of weaker students
  6. making evaluative decisions gives students a sense of control over their learning

How to begin

  1. Students provide an abstract with an assignment submission: they have to stand back and identify what they have written and the absract helps you to see what they think is important
  2. Similarly, students might provide written explanation of the concepts underpinning a problem they are working on or the elegance of different solution pathways
  3. Students evaluate their own work against criteria when they hand it in.
  4. You provide some good quality reports from a previous year and ask students to order them from best to least good including their own and give a reason for their ranking 
  5. Evaluate and provide feedback on the work of peers who have completed an assignment in the same topic domain
  6. Students produce a poster in a group on a topic of importance and hang it in class then all students individually walk round and add a written feedback comment (e.g. an alternative viewpoint, a suggestion for improvement, a creative addition).  Note that students learn as much from evaluating and producing comments as the group do from their receipt,
  7. See also principle 3
  8. Invent your own example and send it to us