Table 1 Practices to develop evaluative judgement: sub-optimal strategies and potential improvements

Self-assessment

Self-assessments that solely generate grades or contribute to final grades; which do not involve students in identifying or considering criteria; which provide no feedback on the quality of the judgements involved.

Focus on how to identify and choose criteria for judgement; feedback to indicate how the self-assessment might be improved in future; use of self-assessments which span units and identify future learning needed.

Peer feedback/review

Peer assessment which substitutes for teacher marking; peer feedback without consideration of criteria and the varieties of ways in which they may be applied; peer review without orientation and discussion of issues that may arise.

Emphasis on perspectives peers can uniquely bring to the work (e.g. extent to which it communicates to them quality); focus on the how work meets or does not meet agreed standards and criteria; appreciation that benefits might accrue more to the provider than the receiver of information.

Feedback

Feedback as ‘telling’ (Sadler 1989) or ‘corrections’ or as information handed to the student; information provided at times and on tasks, or in a manner which does not allow it to be easily used for future work; provision of information without follow-up on whether it was able to be used in subsequent tasks.

Feedback as dialogue which looks to future tasks rather than just present instances of work; sufficient detail and justification which help students understand how their work aligned or differed from the standards employed and information that expects a response or a plan for action; contains feedback that responds to students’ self-assessment of their own work; maintaining a feedback journal that spans a course with ipsative feedback per competence or learning outcome rather than task or unit focused.

Rubrics

Rubrics as checklists in a present/absent dichotomy rather than descriptors of quality of work; use of criteria that students have not been involved in discussing; rubrics supplanting evaluative judgement; standardised templates that do not respond to the different forms of judgement needed for each task.

Rubrics implemented with formative assessment purposes, rubrics co-created to develop a shared understanding of criteria and how they might be applied; rubrics that represent how evaluative judgements are actually made in the particular discipline; dialogic use of rubrics where there is discussion around the descriptors/criteria; use of rubrics in conjunction with exemplars; movement back and forth from work to rubrics then to the work to formulate deeper understandings of quality; rubric criteria that span multiple tasks across units.

Exemplars

Exemplars may be merely given to students or uploaded on a learning management system with little discussion of how quality is demonstrated within the exemplar.

Multiple, different exemplars discussed with peers and teachers to uncover what the range of quality indicators might be.