Quality awareness

If a student makes an assignment, then the question ‘Am I doing well?’ or ‘Is it good enough?’ is bound to be familiar. If a student wants to succeed in a subject, it is important to know what he or she needs to work towards. Getting clarity on this is not always possible with simply reading assessment criteria and/or learning objectives. So how do you help students get clarity? In this article we talk about the importance of developing quality awareness.

Quality awareness is incredibly useful. If students know what quality is, you contribute to the transparency of your assessment. Students know what is expected of them and do not encounter surprises. Furthermore, quality awareness allows the feedback process to be more efficient¹. Having good quality awareness lays the foundation for being able to assess the quality of your own work, as well as the work of others.

Developing quality awareness

Unfortunately, current ways of developing quality awareness do not always work optimally yet. For example, sharing assessment criteria and rubrics is a common way. This method turns out to be far from always effective²,³. Students need to be activated to do something with the rubrics so that they also understand what the language in the rubric means. In practice, this is quite difficult. For example, how do you go about clarifying what constitutes good ‘logical reasoning’?

The best way to get a sense of quality is by sharing examples³,⁴,⁵. Think about how you start a new task at work. How do you proceed then? Chances are you ask colleagues how they tackled something, or you ask for examples so that you can quickly get an idea of what is intended. This is no different for students.

Yet teachers are still sometimes reluctant to share examples. They don’t want students to think that the example is the only way to tackle a task. For this reason, it is important to share multiple examples. Thereby, sharing the examples alone is not enough to get a good understanding of quality, we need to work with them. A good way to do this is by comparing the selected examples with each other³.

Comparing

Comparing is a very natural process. It turns out to be extremely difficult for a person to make an absolute assessment of the quality of a work, while comparing works is a lot easier. We made this principle clear earlier with the example of buying shoes: after all, for this you don’t take a list of criteria, but compare shoes with each other or with an ideal image in your head. Only by comparing, you get an idea of where shoes can differ. The same applies to an assignment for students: by seeing multiple examples, you get an idea of quality.

Comparing gives students an insight into how work can differ from each other. There is an opportunity to expose nuances: a very good work may still have areas for improvement, and a work that is clearly not yet on point may already have good elements. Instead of talking abstractly about what good work looks like, you actually see it in front of you and can discuss it³. Comparing examples not only helps clarify for students what quality means. It is also found to promote motivation and self-regulation skills⁶,⁷. In addition, it turns out that students are actually just as good at comparative judgement as teachers, and their assessment is largely similar³.

Working with Comproved

Comproved’s comparing tool is the way to have students easily compare examples, whether written text, images or even videos. By having students name the strengths and improvements of the examples in the tool, as a teacher you can quickly see how students looked at the example work. One of our users has already told us how this worked. Would you like to start developing students’ quality awareness yourself? We have gained a lot of experience and would be happy to help you!

In dialogue

Once the examples have been compared, students will need to process the information in some way to make sense of it³. This is best done in dialogue. What strengths and what areas for improvement did they see in the examples? What does this say about good quality work? Then you can try to summarise this information with students³, making it clear what students are ultimately assessed on³. By doing so, you not only give students a sense of quality, but also a say in the assessment process.

If your course is very large or this way of working is too time-consuming, you can also choose to share a pre-prepared criteria list or rubric with students after they have compared sample work. Just be sure to discuss this list with students to make the translation from comparing examples to the language on the list. If they have good suggestions for additions or adjustments, you can collect these and decide with colleagues whether to implement them or not. If the assessment criteria are completely fixed in advance, it is still useful to talk to students and clear up possible ambiguities in the criteria using the examples. That way, students have at least developed a concrete sense of quality and it is clear what is meant by the text in the criteria list or rubric.

Getting started with comparing to develop quality awareness? Comproved makes the process easy and clear. Read more here.

Literature

¹Carless, D., & Boud, D. (2018). The development of student feedback literacy: enabling uptake of feedback. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43(8), 1315-1325, https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2018.1463354 

²Hendry, G. D., Armstrong, S., & Bromberger, N. (2012). Implementing standards-based assessment effectively: incorporating discussion of exemplars into classroom teaching. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 37(2), 149-161. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2010.515014 

³Bouwer, R., Lesterhuis, M., Bonne, P., & De Maeyer, S. (2018). Applying criteria to examples or learning by comparison: effects on students’ evaluative judgment and performance in writing. Frontiers in Education (3), 86. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2018.00086 

⁴Kneyber, R., Sluijsmans, D., Devid, V., & Wilde López, B. (2022). Formatief handelen: van instrument naar ontwerp. Phronese. 

⁵Vanhoof, S., & Speltincx, G. (2021). Feedback in de klas. Verborgen leerkansen. Lannoo Campus.

⁶Hawe, E., Lightfoot, U., & Dixon, H. (2019). First-year students working with exemplars: promoting self-efficacy, self-monitoring and self-regulation. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 43(1), 30-44. Https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877X.2017.1349894 

⁷To, J., Panadero, E., & Carless, D. (2022). A systematic review of the educational uses and effects of exemplars. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 47(8), 1167-1182, https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2021.2011134