Critical Evaluation Toolkit

Helping students assess their own, and others', writing

The following strategy is useful when giving students the opportunity to peer assess one another's written work.

• Students, in groups of four, choose the best paper, then join with a second group and choose the best of the two. This last paper is read to the class as a whole and a class-wide discussion is held about the strengths and weakness of the papers chosen, leading to the class voting on the best paper of the day;
• Students in groups of three or four write out their recommendations for improvement on three or four papers (from students not in their group). The written recommendations go back to the original writer who does a revised draft for next time;
• Students in groups of three or four take turns reading their papers and discuss the extent to which they have, or have not, fulfilled the performance criteria relevant to the paper;
• One student's paper is read aloud slowly to the class while the instructor leads a class-wide discussion on how the paper might be improved. Then the students work in groups of two or three to try to come up with recommendations for improvement for the students in their group (based on the model established by the instructor).

Structures for Student Self-Assessment.
Retrieved from the World Wide Web on 20 August, 2004.
http://www.criticalthinking.org/University/univclass/selfassess.html

"Evaluation involves:

Giving reasons for beliefs and decisions and choosing how to act;

Criticising ideas constructively; and

Modifying ideas in response to criticism."

Lipman, M. (1991). Thinking in Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, cited in Slade, C. (1995). Higher order thinking in institutions of higher learning. Unicorn, 21 (1), pp. 39.

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