5 ways to encourage quality awareness among students

Quality awareness is a very useful thing. If students have a good idea of what different quality levels look like, what level of quality is expected and how to get to the expected level, it is easier to deliver something of high quality themselves. But how can you encourage quality awareness among your students? Here are 3 ways.

A widely used method to encourage quality awareness among students is sharing a rubric. This has many advantages: students know what is expected of them and what level of quality they are aiming for; it has a positive impact on their self-regulation and motivation; and it creates transparency about the assessment and feedback process.

However, just sharing quality criteria or a rubric does not seem to be enough to give students a clear picture of what quality is. Thus, a real sense of quality is not yet developed. To have quality awareness, students not only need to know what level of quality is expected and what it looks like. They also need to know how to get to a certain level of quality. And they learn this by gaining experience and actively working with criteria. Here are 3 ways to do so.

1. Co-creating quality criteria

As mentioned above, merely sharing quality criteria is not enough to encourage quality awareness among students. Often, rubrics remain quite abstract. Just try to explain in words what a good ‘logical reasoning’ is. The meaning of quality criteria will become clearer if they emerge from a process of co-creation with students. Also, involvement in criteria creation will promote students’ self-regulation.

There are various ways of involving students in the creation of quality criteria, such as the Placemat or the T-card method. You can read exactly how this works on the proev website (in Dutch). The resulting criteria can then be included in a criteria list or rubric.

2. Working with examples

The best way to get a good idea of quality is to compare examples. Comparing is a natural process. This is because the human brain is better at comparing products than at judging a product in an absolute way. By comparing examples, quality really comes alive. Students actually see what a quality work is instead of talking about it abstractly.

To get started with examples, have your students in groups compare about 3 examples (e.g. assignments from a previous school year). Make sure the examples are anonymised and that they differ in quality. Instruct your students to rank the works according to quality and, in doing so, have them note strengths and areas for improvement for each work. Finally, have each group report back in class and argue the ranking based on the points they noted.

To compare examples, you can also use Comproved’s comparing tool. You, as the teacher, upload the example works, the students then start comparing. They are shown several randomly composed pairs and each time they have to indicate the best work of the two. They can also note down feedback on the works. After all comparisons have been made, the tool calculates the ranking of the works.

4. Discussing quality

Crucial in the process of developing quality awareness is to engage in conversation about quality. This ideally happens after students have compared examples. What strengths and areas for improvement did they see? What does that say about the quality of the work? With these insights, you can create a criteria list or rubric in class. Don’t have that much time? Then you can also share a pre-prepared rubric with your students after they made the comparisons. Remember to still discuss this list to translate what they saw in the examples to the language in the list. You can then clear up ambiguities in the quality criteria using the examples.

Want to get started with the comparing tool yourself to boost your students’ quality awareness? Don’t hesitate to contact us!