Evaluative writing is probably the hardest thing we teach, and it’s always a work in progress. Since I started teaching Psychology (some 20-odd years ago) I’ve tried to teach written evaluation many different ways and never really been satisfied with the result. Part of the problem is that I have no recollection of actually being taught to do it. Clearly, this must have happened as it seems very unlikely that I worked out how to evaluate on my own and it’s certainly the case that I wasn’t always able to do it. But I suspect it was a process that happened subtly, of the course of many interactions with many teachers and over a long time. I’m also fairly certain I only started to learn how to do it during my undergraduate degree (I do remember slaving over an essay on Autism in my first year, which my early mentor Brown gave a First whilst damning it with faint praise as ‘a series of bright apercus’; I thanked him later). Contrary to popular opinion, the A – Levels we did in those days did not make significant demands on critical thinking and pretty good performance was guaranteed to anyone who could read a syllabus, was sufficiently skilled in memorising large chunks of material verbatim and could write quickly.
However, the specifications we teach now, and the exams for which we must prepare our students, make pretty stiff demands on students’ capacity to write critically in response to questions that are increasingly difficult to predict. The new Edexcel specification (I can’t speak for the others) has upped the ante on this even further as their rules for the phrasing of questions limit their essay questions to a single command term (e.g. ‘Evaluate…’) even when students are expected to address several different assessment objectives in their responses. In contrast to the questions they used to face (e.g. ‘Describe and evaluate…’), where it would always be possible for students to score marks by addressing the ‘knowledge and understanding’ element even if the critical thinking aspect was ropey, the new arrangements mean that students must address the main assessment objective all the way through their response at the same time as addressing a subsidiary assessment objective that is only implied by the question. Consequently, it is more important than ever to teach evaluative writing early in the course, and as quickly and thoroughly as we can.
But, as I said, I can’t remember learning to do it. Furthermore, evaluative writing is, for me (and presumably for most other people who do it a lot), procedural knowledge, so what we are doing when we evaluate is not easily consciously inspected: we simply evaluate. As a result, I have spent a fair bit of my career trying to teach something very important with neither a clear idea of what it consists of nor a principled understanding of how it develops. In the absence of these things it is very difficult to communicate to students what the goal is or support them in moving towards it effectively. The risk then is that ‘evaluation’ gets reduced to a set of theory-specific ‘points’ for students to learn more-or-less verbatim. This is unsatisfactory because (1) it doesn’t equip them to meet the demands of the current assessment scene; and (2) because we’re supposed to be teaching them to think, dammit. However, this is what I have done in the past and I suspect I’m not alone.
I started making more progress a few years ago when I began to use the SOLO taxonomy (Biggs & Collis, 1982) and the Toulmin Model of Argumentation (Toulmin, 1958) as the basis for teaching evaluation. I won’t unpack these ideas here (although the SOLO taxonomy provokes lively debate so I might come back to it in a future post) but they lead to a model of evaluative writing in which the student needs to:
- Identify the claims made by a theory;
- Explain the reasons why each claim should be accepted or rejected;
- Present evidence that supports or challenges the reasons;
- Develop their argument, for example by assessing the validity of the evidence or by comparing with a competing theory.
This might sound obvious to you but it has really helped me think clearly about what students need to learn and what the barriers to learning it are likely to be. The fundamental block is where a student has a naive personal epistemology in which they regard theories as incontrovertible statements of fact (see Hofer & Pintrich, 2002). In that case evaluation can only be experienced as a mysterious and peculiar game (my own research on epistemic cognition suggests that this may frequently be the case). We can start to address this by presenting psychological knowledge using a language of possibilities and uncertainty (this is particularly salient to me as I teach in a girls’ school; Belenky et al, 1986) and by continually returning to the idea that scientific theories are maps of the world and the map is not the territory (NB. this is a job for the long haul). Other barriers are where:
- The student cannot identify the specific claims made by a theory;
- The student cannot identify evidence that relates to these claims;
- The student cannot articulate reasons why the evidence supports or challenges the claims;
- The student cannot introduce principled judgements about the validity of the evidence.
Again, all this might seem obvious but where a student has difficulty writing good evaluation it gives a starting point for diagnosing the possible problem and therefore intervening successfully. My own experience with Year 12 and 13 students (OK, not particularly scientific but it’s all I’ve got) suggests that the major sticking points are (1) because the theory itself has not been well understood and (3) because the student needs to identify what the theory predicts and reconcile these with a distillation of what, generally, the evidence suggests, so they tend to jump from claim to evidence but don’t explain the connection between the two.
Inevitably, any class we teach is going to contain students whose capacities to think and write in these ways vary, often considerably. We therefore might wish to differentiate activities whose aim is to develop evaluative writing. One way of doing this is to break down evaluation of a particular theory into claims, reasons and evidence by preparing a set of cards. Here is an example set for evaluating Atkinson and Shiffrin’s multi-store model of memory. All students are given an evaluative writing task, and are given a subset of the cards to support them. The subset given depends on the student’s current capacity:
- Level 1 – students are given all the cards. Their challenge is to match up the claims/reasons/evidence and use suitable connectives to turn them into well-articulated critical points.
- Level 2 – students are given the claims and the reasons. Their challenge is to identify suitable evidence (e.g. from prior learning) and include this in their evaluation.
- Level 3 – students are given the claims and the evidence. Their challenge is to explain the reasons why each claim should be accepted/rejected before introducing the evidence.
- Level 4 – students are given the claims only. Their challenge is to articulate suitable reasons for accepting/rejecting the claims and link these to suitable evidence (e.g. from prior learning)
- Level 5 – students who show competence at level 4 are then invited to consider quality of evidence/competing theories. Visible thinking routines like tug-of-war can be useful here (see Ritchhart et al, 2011).
This general structure can be used for activities supporting the evidential evaluation of any psychological theory. Intuitively, its success probably depends on the amount of practice students get with the format of the activity, and their sense of progress could depend on our pointing out how their performance has changed as they get more practice. It also depends crucially on students’ understanding of the roles of claims, reasons and evidence, which should not be taken for granted. A common problem is where students believe that the reasons are reasons for making a claim (which leads to circular arguments), not reasons why it should be accepted as true/rejected as false.
As usual, no guarantees can be given about the effectiveness of this approach relative to the alternatives but it does seem to give focus to my feedback about quality of evaluative writing and it has helped shift our students’ extended responses in a direction more likely to appeal to Edexcel’s examiners. If anyone has thoughts about the above, I’d love to hear them.
Belenky, M.F., Clinchy, B.M., Goldberger, N.R. & Tarule, J.M. (1986). Women’s ways of knowing: the development of self, voice and mind. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Biggs, J.B. & Collis, K.F. (1982). Evaluating the quality of learning: the SOLO taxonomy. New York, NY: Academic Press.
Hofer, B.K. & Pintrich, P.R. (2002). Personal epistemology: The psychology of beliefs about knowledge and knowing. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates.
Ritchhart, R., Church, M. & Morrison, K. (2011). Making thinking visible: How to promote engagement, understanding and independence for all learners. Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass.
Toulmin, S.E. (1958). The uses of argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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