How can learners practice evaluative judgement using qualitative self-assessment?

Abstract

To progress with their learning, students need to be able to make judgements about the quality of their own work and the work of others. This capability is known as evaluative judgement. The importance of evaluative judgement is well-established, but environments in which learners practice this capability remain unknown. This paper explores whether learners practice evaluative judgement within qualitative self-assessment. We conducted a thematic analysis of students’ qualitative self-assessments from years one, three and four of construction management and building surveying courses and analysed approximately 430 pages of text. Our analysis indicated that learners often practised evaluative judgement during qualitative self-assessment even when such pedagogical activity was not specifically designed for this purpose. While constructing their professional knowledge, learners made evaluations of the quality of work, their own and the work of others. Based on our findings, we recommend that qualitative self-assessment is embedded within curricula to enable learners to practice evaluative judgement.

Keywords:

• Evaluative judgement
• qualitative self-assessment
• quality
• comparison

Introduction

The awareness of what good work looks like is of great importance. It allows learners, graduates and professionals to make informed judgements. This concept is known as evaluative judgement, the capability of learners to make judgements about the quality of their own work and the work of others (Tai et al. 2018). Understanding: (i) what opportunities there are to develop evaluative judgement, (ii) how evaluative judgement opportunities can be assessed, and (iii) how learners draw on evaluative judgement to improve is of great importance for learners and educators in higher education. Practising evaluative judgement within the educational environment allows learners to become versatile professionals and lifelong learners. Self-assessment, as pedagogical activity, is described as a way to develop evaluative judgement (Tai et al. 2018) but how this happens is not yet clearly defined, with limited empirical evidence examining this opportunity. Within educational and professional environments, we are often asked to self-evaluate our performances, reflect on our achievements, or judge the quality of work. Even when we partake in these types of activities, it is not always explicitly understood how such self-assessment processes contribute to the development of evaluative judgement. This paper seeks to identify the ways that learners practise evaluative judgement within self-assessment.

Evaluative judgement requires the development of the capability to make judgements about quality (Tai et al. 2018). Understanding what quality work is and how it is created is one of the implicit aims of education, enabling learners to become better judges of their own work (Boud, Lawson, and Thompson 2013). Making educational and professional judgements based on the understanding of quality is also considered a prerequisite for learners to succeed in their learning and professional practice (Cowan 2010; Boud and Soler 2016). It is not desirable (and perhaps impossible) for practising professionals to always rely on others to tell them how well they perform. Furthermore, developing evaluative judgement capability allows learners to be well-rounded citizens and contribute to our society. Thus, the importance of developing evaluative judgement capabilities extends well beyond the university setting and the workplace.

Qualitative self-assessment is one pedagogical activity that may provide a suitable opportunity for learners to practice evaluative judgement. Self-assessment has been defined as instances when learners make judgements and decisions about their own work against specific criteria (Adachi, Tai, and Dawson 2018). The literature provides different purposes of self-assessment, including explaining interpersonal performance (Ohland et al. 2012), self-agency (Barber, King, and Baxter Magolda 2013), and the ability of learners to assess the quality of their progress (Panadero, Brown, and Strijbos 2016). Self-assessments take different forms depending on their purpose. One explicit and common form is asking learners to grade their own work, pejoratively referred to by Tai et al. (2018) as ‘grade guessing’. Some self-assessments are also implicit within other assessment tasks and therefore have not been well examined. Self-assessment has been used to describe a variety of activities that involve assessing one’s own functioning (Andrade 2019). Many studies of self-assessment have been orientated towards quantitative outputs (i.e. alignment of grades between learners and educators). For the purposes of this study, we focus on qualitative self-assessment, which we define as ‘a subjective self-evaluation process where learners evaluate and reflect on their own work or learning to determine if they have achieved the required standard’.

Self-assessment should not be understood as an isolated individual activity (Boud 1999), and indeed we rarely see self-assessment as a standalone pedagogical activity. It is more commonly part of a broader educational design and entangled with other pedagogical activities, either as a complementary or mandatory learning task. Based on these definitions, judging the quality of work is an integral component of both evaluative judgement and self-assessment, expressed as an action in self-assessment and a capability in evaluative judgement.

Self-assessment might contribute to developing evaluative judgement since it involves judging the quality of work, but this has not been a focus of the self-assessment literature. Andrade (2019) reported that it is not always explicit how such pedagogical activity contributes to developing different capabilities, including evaluative judgement. Despite such findings, self-assessment has been found to trigger reflection and critical thinking amongst students (McIver and Murphy 2023), which might be related to evaluative judgement. Evaluative judgement is often not explicitly embedded in curriculum design. However, qualitative self-assessment activities may be one productive opportunity to identify and research how students can develop evaluative judgement in educational settings.

This paper aims to explore how a qualitative self-assessment can provide learners with an opportunity to practice evaluative judgement. Therefore, our research question is: how can self-assessment provide learners with opportunities to practice evaluative judgement? We explore this question through an analysis of a self-assessment activity that provided an opportunity to observe learners practising evaluative judgement.

Methodology

We undertook a qualitative study of a self-assessment learning activity at an Australian higher education institution. This enabled us to investigate how learners practice evaluative judgement in self-assessment. The activity was pre-existing, so no changes to the curriculum or assessment were needed. Ethical approval was granted by the Faculty of Arts and Education Human Ethics Advisory Group (HEAG) at Deakin University (reference number: HAE-19-187).

Context

This study was conducted in the Bachelor of Construction Management and Economics and Bachelor of Building Surveying programs within a non-university provider of higher education in Australia. Units of learning for the first three academic years of these programs are the same for learners in both disciplines. The fourth academic year is the specialisation year when learners undertake discipline-specific subjects. We studied self-assessments from academic years one, three and four. Selected self-assessments were from (i) novice learners who are at the beginning of their academic journey (year one learners), (ii) educationally more mature learners who were working on complex industry problems (year three learners) and (iii) learners in their specialisation year searching for solutions to improve industry performance (year four learners). This study focused on qualitative self-assessment learning activities, which were designed as evaluative and reflective pieces of work. To minimise the impact of power imbalance, learners were only invited to participate in this research once they had successfully completed a specific subject and achieved a passing grade.

Self-assessment was not graded separately but is a key element of the assessment task. The self-assessment is qualitative and is made up of three main components: (i) explicit learning outcomes that serve as a representation of the criteria that learners must meet; (ii) learners’ self-assessment component (completed by learners providing justifications, clarifications, evaluations and analyses of how the criteria have been met); and (iii) the evidence identification section, which asks learners to make it clear how such judgements are supported by evidence. A fourth component is a section designated for the assessor to make their professional judgement with OK or Not OK indicators by providing OK in instances when the learner achieved required learning outcomes or Not OK in instances when such achievement is lacking. From the perspective of each subject, the aim for the learner was not only to produce a piece of work (i.e. a report or essay) but also to use self-assessment to justify, clarify and elaborate on how learning objectives were achieved and where evidence was found.

Researchers’ characteristics and reflexivity

The quality and trustworthiness of qualitative research can be enhanced and evidenced through transparent reflectivity processes (Barrett, Kajamaa, and Johnston 2020). The research team brought a variety of expertise to this research. CG is an educator in the built environment discipline with expertise in the same discipline but with limited expertise in qualitative research studies. JT is a higher education researcher proficient in qualitative and quantitative research who conducted foundational evaluative judgement research. KNR is a higher education researcher from the allied health disciplines who has conducted research investigating the development of evaluative judgement in occupational therapy learners undertaking clinical placements. PD is a higher education researcher who has undertaken conceptual research on evaluative judgement and related topics such as feedback and rubrics. As this study intends to explore opportunities learners have to practice evaluative judgement through self-assessment, we wish to state that our individual understandings, expertise and experiences may shape how we understand evaluative judgement.

Procedure

Artefacts collected for this research study range from Semester 2, 2019 until Semester 2, 2020 (both inclusive). Eligible learners were invited to participate in the study via an email sent by an administrative officer. A total of 30 learners agreed to participate and provided consent to access their submitted and assessed work. Self-assessments were an integral part of assessments, and learners concurrently developed self-assessments as they worked on their assessment tasks. For each assessment task, learners were given approximately six weeks to complete. During this timeframe, they were provided with the opportunity to receive formative feedback comments from educators, helping them to make connections between their assessment task (assignments or essays) and their justifications, clarifications and evaluations in self-assessment. Justifications, clarifications and evaluations learners had used in their self-assessments were used as data.

Data analysis

This study is based on constructivism (Vygotsky 1978) as we are focused on the active and constructive process of knowledge development. Constructivism can be used as a learning theory in education, where individuals develop their knowledge within a social context, rather than passively internalising information. This emphasises that learning is a shared rather than individual experience. This approach guided us in inductive analysis to construct relevant themes for this study. Collected self-assessments were coded with NVivo. The self-assessment artefacts varied from 2 to 15 pages in length containing between 500 and 5,400 words, totalling approximately 430 pages with 12,000 words. Thematic analysis as described by Braun and Clarke (2006) was used, acknowledging that we actively created themes from the data set rather than allow them to emerge passively.

The first step in the thematic analysis was familiarisation with the dataset conducted by the lead researcher (CG). CG read and re-read the dataset, noting down initial ideas. Once initial ideas were identified, the lead researcher coded interesting features across the entire dataset, discussed codes and collated data relevant to each code with other researchers. The research team used ten codes, collating them into potential themes. A total of 12 themes were developed initially. During this time, CG met regularly with other researchers and discussed the development and interpretation of themes, allowing for ongoing analysis and fine-tuning of each theme. The research team decided that only the theme labelled ‘evaluative judgment’ would be used and analysed for this study. Although there was a variation in the size of student self-assessments, artefacts from 27 students helped to form this theme. Themes were supported by vivid and robust extracts from the data and were constructed based on both semantic and latent content in the dataset (Braun and Clarke 2021). As researchers, we acknowledge that, during data analysis, we identified and interpreted what we believe was evaluative judgement. The analysis focused on instances where learners practised their evaluative judgement.

Results

The study’s primary conclusion is that learners can practice evaluative judgement when provided with an opportunity to critically analyse, reflect, compare and evaluate their work or the work of others. The data included many explicit instances of analysis, reflections and comparisons within the self-assessment learning activity. For example, one of the participants described:

While undertaking this unit I have also been studying Large Scale Mixed-Use Sustainable Development. I found that a great deal of my learnings overlapped. I was able to use the same concepts for both units. After preparing the feasibility guideline I have learned that there are certain procedures need to be applied within each principle to determine the viability of a project.

Findings from the study can be grouped into three themes, namely: (i) reflection on knowledge and knowledge construction; (ii) notions of quality; and (iii) comparison and judgement. Reflection on knowledge and knowledge constructs contains the subthemes of professional knowledge as a prerequisite for evaluative judgement and entanglement of knowledge, reflection and justification. Notions of quality contain subthemes of quality, scenario-making and prioritisation. Subthemes of comparison and judgement-making supported the comparison and judgement theme in our study.

Reflection on knowledge and knowledge construction

Professional knowledge acquisition as a prerequisite for evaluative judgement

Our findings suggested that identifying what is not known and what needs to be learned is necessary in order to make judgements and construct professional knowledge (discipline-specific knowledge within a profession). We observed that learners, by using self-assessment, perceived acquiring professional knowledge as a process, not a single outcome. In some instances, learners explicitly compared their professional knowledge and level of understanding at the beginning and end of their assessment tasks. Learners’ self-assessment activities helped them identify what they did not know at that stage of their learning, enabling them to design a process to acquire the required professional knowledge:

I never knew what a client brief was before undertaking this project. I now know that the client brief is a very important piece of information used to define the project requirements. Every client has a different background as well as needs and objectives as outlined in LO2; therefore, every client brief is unique. The brief is also unique in that every site and the constraints affecting that site are different… Projects and briefs can fail if there is an unclear understanding within the client brief of what the client wants.

In this example, the learner used self-assessment for multiple purposes. Firstly, the learner used self-assessment requirements to calibrate their understanding and knowledge about the client brief. The learner acknowledged the lack of knowledge and experience about client briefs at the beginning and what had been learned at the end of the learning process. Secondly, the learner identified unique characteristics of a client brief, which illuminates acquired content knowledge. Lastly, the learner demonstrated that professional knowledge had been acquired by analysing and evaluating what may happen if there is a lack of understanding of what the client wants or if project participants are not following the client brief.

Entanglement of knowledge, reflection and justification

Within self-assessment, learners made judgements. However, some of these judgements leaned more towards personal opinions due to insufficient professional knowledge acquired at that stage. Once learners acquired professional knowledge, they used reflection and justification to convince others that their judgements were not opinions but instead grounded in professional knowledge. Therefore, opportunities learners had to reflect and justify how professional knowledge was applied and what reasoning for application was enabled them to practice evaluative judgement more often and improve their judgements over time.

My understanding of this LO developed; in that we were able to develop a Master Plan for the proposed development. As the name suggests, the Master Plan is an all-encompassing action plan for the proposed development. During the brainstorming process, we quickly realised that we need to present the client with a visual representation of how the site will be developed and subdivided, i.e. the various zones within the site. I believe that this will assist with “selling” the idea to the client.

In this example, the ability to develop a master plan required understanding and knowledge of the developmental processes of the master plan. Such professional knowledge was supported by reflections and justifications indicating that the learner was not making just a judgement but rather practised evaluative judgement. An indication that the learner has been practising evaluative judgement is evident through cyclical reflections and justifications the learner used to deliver the most suitable master plan for that particular site.

Notions of quality

The notion of quality as an integral component of evaluative judgement

Learners within the study often used the notion of quality within self-assessment, or what may represent quality in their view, to help them justify their achievements. One way to demonstrate quality is to examine the quality of work within the educational environment by using the role of a professional person from the industry. Discussing quality using indicators commonly used in the industry facilitated learners to practice evaluative judgement within an educational setting.

As the lead consultant for the Knoxfield development, I had to focus on specific project risks that would impact our obligations of delivering a successful project.

In this example, it is evident that the notion of quality is demonstrated by understanding the roles and responsibilities of a professional consultant in the industry. The learner is aware that being professional requires understanding what quality indicators are and what a quality project looks like. Focusing on a specific process (in this instance, risks) is a neat way to demonstrate that the professional capabilities required to deliver a successful project have been achieved.

In some other instances, learners appeared to understand quality more broadly:

I understand that constructability and buildability plays a great role in the construction industry. There are principles which guides (sic) the two concepts, and these principles needs (sic) to be strictly followed so that their efficiency is realised. This learning outcome has been insightful, as I managed to understand deeply these concepts.

In this example, quality is understood at a more holistic level. The learner is aware that quality needs to be aligned with the perception of quality accepted in the industry. Self-assessment allowed the learner to evaluate how the quality of their work met industry accepted quality. The notion of quality of the learner is evident in understanding that principles of constructability and buildability need to be strictly followed to achieve the desired level of quality. Any deviation may result in failing to meet industry accepted level of quality.

Scenario-making and prioritisation contributes to evaluative judgement

To make appropriate decisions about future outcomes, some learners used scenarios to make judgements. Learners appeared to create scenarios using their academic and professional experiences within the self-assessment activity. This allowed them to test different scenarios within a safe educational environment. Scenario-making is a suitable approach to test and evaluate different strategies and scenarios to establish a ‘workable’ solution for the project. To find a ‘workable’ solution for the project, it is appropriate to test and assess several tactics and situations. High-risk sectors prefer to use a scenario-making examining ‘what if’ scenarios to prevent outcomes that could harm people or endanger project success.

This allowed each factor to be analysed in relation to the project and if it was found to be not viable, then changes could be made or manipulated in order to create an example of what we should be looking to achieve in relation to the financials, to create a desired outcome and as an extension, reach a point of feasibility.

In this example, the learner created a possible scenario for a project by analysing each factor in the process, trying to predict possible outcomes, and evaluating the impacts of possible outcomes. By using self-assessment, the learner was able to evaluate multiple scenarios and make a judgement of what a successful project should look like.

Closely related to the scenario-making process is prioritisation of potential outcomes. Prioritisation was not always explicit, but in some cases, the quality of the outcome identified by learners suggested that they undertook extensive evaluation and reflection processes. Learners in this study demonstrated that self-assessment activities assisted them with prioritising and identifying the single best possible outcome for the project.

The decision of allocating the northern part of the site which includes the dam as part of stage 1 is due to the time-sensitivity in regard to dam rectification. As problems of flooding occurs during rain which would affect the site, I decided to prioritise this.

In this example, it was necessary to make a judgement about the dam location at a particular stage of the developmental process to allow the project’s continuity. Self-assessment allowed the learner to use different scenarios, evaluate them and prioritise one that would be adopted for the project. Self-assessment allowed learners to document their thoughts and ideas regarding scenario-making and prioritisation, illuminating that they practised evaluative judgement.

Comparison and judgement

Self-assessment affords opportunities for comparison and judgement

There are instances in assessment tasks when learners are placed in a situation where they are allocated roles, responsibilities and obligations they would have in their future professional roles. Our data indicated that when learners were placed in such hypothetical professional positions, they were enabled to make professional comparisons and judgements at the same level and quality as professionals in the industry would.

Playing the part of ‘consultants’ in delivering the project, I had to put myself in their shoes and manage stakeholders.

In this example, the learner is aware of the complexity of managing a project and multiple stakeholders. The learner is aware that many comparisons and judgements are required to manage different stakeholders’ expectations and produce a successful project. Self-assessment allowed the learner to document strategies and processes for managing stakeholders and to reflect on possible complexities.

When some learners compare and judge specific project-related matters, it can be understood only by experts from the field. For the average person, some comparisons and judgements made by learners are of little value but contain a wealth of information for an expert person.

Access to the site was very limited, and consideration must be made to who is on the site and when to limit the congestion on the site.

In this example, a reference was made to the limited access to the construction site. Limited site access can create all sorts of issues for the construction site planning process when time needs to be extended, directly affecting the overall cost of the projects, among many other obstacles. In this instance, the learner’s use of comparison is evident when the learner is comparing and making judgements about how the site should be operated due to limited site access. Self-assessment allowed the learner to document and compare different options for reducing congestion on the construction site and to make an appropriate judgement about the most suitable strategy.

Sometimes, the comparisons and judgements made by learners in the data were very transparent:

As part of the development modelling analysis, our thinking was that we needed to offer the client a mixture of options in terms of the breakdown of the residential and commercial components separately. By offering three options for each component, we were able to compare the potential revenue generated by each option.

In this example, self-assessment allowed the learner to make a judgement by proposing three different options perceived as a best possible outcome for the client. The learner provided a comparison of three options using multiple criteria and made a judgement that the client should make a selection after evaluating potential revenue for each option. The industry employs a similar strategy to assist clients with decision-making. Comparing their own judgements with judgements of professionals in the industry may provide a neat way for learners to evidence that they have the skills and capabilities to perform at a professional level.

Discussion

The data presented here demonstrate that learners could and did practice evaluative judgement in qualitative self-assessment. This was explicitly evident in statements when they used reflections, justifications and comparisons when evaluating the quality of work. This suggests that self-assessment can contribute to the development of evaluative judgement, especially when learners construct professional knowledge of certain qualities. This study also suggests that learners’ self-assessments can be a valuable data source to observe opportunities for learners to practice evaluative judgement. Reddy et al. (2020) argue that knowledge construction involves multiple experiences. One such experience is self-assessment, enabling educators to observe how learners practice evaluative judgement while constructing their professional knowledge. Within the educational environment, there are dual benefits of qualitative self-assessment. Firstly, learners are practising evaluative judgement, and secondly, educators can identify and monitor instances when and how learners are practising evaluative judgement.

Our study identified self-assessment as a developmental ingredient of evaluative judgement which allowed individuals to practise it within their studies. Based on our observations, the self-assessment process often begins and ends within a specific assessment or unit of learning (due to the design of assessments). Though it is possible, as identified in this study, that self-assessment provides opportunities to articulate evaluative judgements, multiple linked self-assessment opportunities over time could support learners’ development of more sophisticated or nuanced evaluative judgement (Boud, Lawson and Thompson 2015). Continuous and consistent engagement in self-assessment over an extended period provides opportunities when learners may develop evaluative judgement. This view is also supported by Falchikov and Boud (1989), who demonstrated that learners can better judge their learning later than in earlier years of their studies. A more comprehensive course-wide or programmatic strategy may be necessary to create opportunities for developing evaluative judgement through self-assessment. This approach should ensure continuous and steady involvement in self-assessment activities.

In our data, learners occasionally compared self-assessments within the same unit of learning, but rarely did they compare the content of self-assessments made in other units of learning. Such an outcome was expected as not all units of learning have prerequisites, and learning outcomes may aim to address different contexts (in one unit of learning, the focus may be on construction law, while others may be on site management). Learners who provided minimal evidence of practising evaluative judgement in our study were primarily from the first academic year. This may be due to the disproportionate number of artefacts between academic years (fewer artefacts for analysis from the first academic year). However, it could alternatively be due to the learners with greater ‘academic maturity’ (Boud, Lawson and Thompson 2015) demonstrating more advanced evaluative judgement.

The value proposition of this study is that the cyclical process learners used to create self-assessments, based on quality calibration and adjustment to achieve desired learning outcomes, allowed them to practice evaluative judgement. Such opportunity placed learners in the centre of their learning, allowed them to rethink learning outcomes, curriculum and pedagogies, and allowed them to practice evaluative judgement indirectly. When reflective and evaluative practices (as evident in self-assessment) are implemented, practised and enhanced by learners, they will become aware of their capabilities to make judgements, something they need to make their learning in the future more effective and efficient. Awareness of learners about their judgemental capabilities can also benefit educators. They can be better positioned to advise learners on how to use judgemental capabilities to understand the content they study and use feedback to lead to the creation of valuable outcomes. Feedback literacy (Carless and Boud 2018), as a process when learners understand what and how feedback works for them, may be informed by their evaluative judgement capabilities and presented within qualitative self-assessment.

Self-assessment and evaluative judgement are not the same concept. Our findings indicated that self-assessment should be perceived as a developmental ingredient of evaluative judgement; therefore, it is imperative to outline that the two concepts are distinct. Within the literature, there is little study on the connection between self-assessment and evaluative judgement. The closest similarities between the two concepts are evident in the use of self-assessment as a judgement calibrator (Boud, Lawson, and Thompson 2013; Yan and Brown 2017). Even when both concepts calibrate judgement, this study helped position self-assessment as a ‘process’ that helped learners to practice evaluative judgement by reflecting and comparing their judgements about quality. Self-assessment was evaluated by Adachi, Tai, and Dawson (2018) as a value proposition that improves learning processes, comprehension of necessary standards, and the development of transferrable abilities. Our study confirmed that self-assessment plays an essential role in the learning process and takes a step further by demonstrating that self-assessment enables learners to practice evaluative judgement. There were instances within our study that demonstrated that self-assessment enabled learners to identify, address and calibrate changing circumstances within a specific context (Autrey et al. 2018; To and Panadero 2019). Our study demonstrated that learners who utilised self-assessment to practice evaluative judgement improved their judgement capabilities within a specific context. This study indicated that self-assessment and evaluative judgement might share some developmental paths but are distinct concepts.

Professional knowledge is favourable for learners to exercise evaluative judgement and necessary for educators to determine if evaluative judgement has been exercised. Our study’s data on self-assessments demonstrated how learners justified and clarified learning outcomes and how assessment objectives were achieved. According to Andrade (2019), self-assessment as the evaluative process helps learners to make learning and performance adjustments. Consequentially, the same process enabled them to practice evaluative judgement. Previous research conducted by Kruger and Dunning (1999) emphasised the idea that professional knowledge contributes to more accurate self-evaluation. This view is in line with Sadler (2010), who argues that to make an appropriate evaluative judgement, learners are required to construct professional knowledge. We found that discipline specific and professional knowledge is needed in many instances by learners to practice evaluative judgement. In some circumstances and within our data, only educators with expertise in the field could confirm that learners are practising evaluative judgement. Such expertise allowed the identification of instances when learners are eloquent and arguments in self-assessment are convincing but without quality content in their work. Under such circumstances, educators could confirm that learners did not construct the required knowledge and did not or poorly practiced evaluative judgement.

Educators play an essential role in enabling learners to construct professional knowledge and in enabling them to recognise and apply such knowledge. Knowledge construction and application require learners to analyse within themself and reconstruct content already known but not recognised (Dobson and Fudiyartanto 2023). Our study demonstrated that in many instances, by using self-assessment, learners discovered their knowledge and made it more explicit. Consequentially, by using self-assessment, learners practised evaluative judgement even when they did not recognise that they were making judgements. In parallel with knowledge acquisition by the learner, educators also may use self-assessment to guide how learners acquire the professional knowledge required for a specific context. This can be done by multiple submissions of self-assessment and constructive feedback provided by educators. Such a process allows learners to adjust the trajectory of knowledge acquisition if and when required, and educators to prompt a trajectory change if and when necessary. Our study examined only the final submissions of self-assessment. However, as self-assessment developed over time, we believe that learners started practising evaluative judgement along that knowledge acquisition trajectory. However, as each learner is different and knowledge acquisition is a complex construct, practising evaluative judgement does not start simultaneously for all learners.

Internal comparisons played an important role in evaluative judgement. Our analysis indicated that in some instances, learners used internal comparisons (Nicol 2020) to make a judgement about quality. As we could not observe internal comparisons of learners when they occurred, we identified them by analysing the quality of the final qualitative self-assessment. Arguments, justifications and reflections emphasised by learners in their self-assessments indicated that they used the internal comparison of quality to frame and present the best possible outcome. In other instances, learners described very explicit internal comparisons in their writing, which were easier to identify and analyse. In these instances, learners would compare their knowledge with the knowledge of others or with reference information. There was evidence of learners comparing the quality of work by benchmarking it with standards or criteria. Learners’ comparative processes in self-assessment appeared to contribute to awareness and judgement about the quality of work, evidencing opportunities and instances when learners practice evaluative judgement.

This study has some limitations. We acknowledge that the learning activities were not specifically designed for practising evaluative judgement. However, by utilising a typical self-assessment activity, we were able to observe opportunities for evaluative judgement that might occur in many assessments currently used in higher education environments. This study only examined how learners practice evaluative judgement at a single point in time (final submissions of self-assessment). Longitudinal studies may be helpful, given that one of the key findings of this study is that evaluative judgement requires multiple opportunities, over an extended period, for learners to practice evaluative judgement. Under such circumstances, observing the development of evaluative judgement in individuals may be possible. Further research could extend this approach by comparing self-assessments of learners in earlier years with learners in later years of their studies to evaluate how the quality of self-assessments changes, and if learners in later academic years practice evaluative judgement more.

Our study examined the self-assessments of students who successfully completed certain units of learning. As such, we lack insight into the potential indications of evaluative judgement that might be present in the self-assessments of students who did not achieve academic success during that period. This could be an interesting topic for someone to explore in future research. This study aimed to explore and describe instances when learners practise evaluative judgement using qualitative self-assessments. While quantifying instances and absences of evaluative judgment could lead to further insights about how it can be developed, this would be more appropriate where evaluative judgement is intentionally supported and an explicit part of the learning activity. Future studies may explore this aspect more comprehensively.

Conclusion

This study explored instances where learners practice evaluative judgement within qualitative self-assessments. This paper has demonstrated that while constructing their professional knowledge, learners also make various evaluations of the quality of work, their own and the work of others. Self-assessment enabled learners to foster critical thinking and evaluative abilities by analysing the quality of their own work and making judgements on their performances. Due to active engagement in the learning process and continued evaluation through self-assessment, learners can align their perception of knowledge and what they really know and identify knowledge gaps.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).