CRADLE’s first book: Developing Evaluative Judgement in Higher Education
16 May 2018
It’s been several years in the making, but we have finally published the first CRADLE-associated book! If you follow @CRADLEDeakin on Twitter, or indeed any of CRADLE’s members and associates, you will have noticed a flurry of tweets lately regarding Developing Evaluative Judgement in Higher Education: Assessment for Knowing and Producing Quality Work. The book was officially published on 19 April 2018, and copies have been gradually making their way around the world since then.
Photo by Joanna Tai
The book deals with a concept we’ve been working on for the past few years: evaluative judgement (EJ). You may have also seen our Open Access paper in Higher Education, titled ‘Developing evaluative judgement: enabling students to make decisions about the quality of work‘, which serves as an introduction to the topic, and provides the following definition:
Evaluative judgement is the capability to make decisions about the quality of work of self and others
We believe it is highly important to develop this capability in higher education students so they are appropriate equipped for their future lives, in work or in further study, where they are unlikely to find the same structures and tools (e.g. rubrics, tests, and exams) for indicating and evidencing quality. However, we very quickly realised that, by ourselves, we would be unable to achieve the scope of impact we thought EJ warranted.
We were fortunate to be able to hold a symposium here at Deakin on evaluative judgement in 2016, and we then invited contributions from attendees, both local and international, who generously provided their own perspectives on and strategies to develop evaluative judgement. As a consequence, the book contains sections on alternate theoretical perspectives, approaches to developing evaluative judgement, and evaluative judgement for practice and work. On the whole, we hope we have developed a rich account of current understandings and future possibilities. We were also very lucky to work with a publisher, Routledge, that was interested in the concept and willing to provide an outlet for this edited book.
Personally, I’m very glad that this book has come to fruition. In early 2016, I felt some trepidation when my colleagues and I agreed EJ should be the topic of our first symposium – it was something that I had written about in one of the papers arising from my PhD, but I really wasn’t sure how EJ could be further developed and positioned as a central concern for education research. To misappropriate a proverb, it really does take a village to develop a concept! It’s been a very productive, educative, and enjoyable journey, and I’m already feeding my learning from this first book into our second CRADLE-associated book, Reimagining Assessment in a Digital World, which we are currently editing.
