Developing Students' Evaluation Skills Fish and Chips evaluation

Thank you to Guy Goodwin for another thoughtful contribution to Agility. Here Guy suggests a technique to help students think about developing their evaluation skills.  The beauty of this tip is that it uses something all students know something about, food, to prompt them to think about how to evaluate.

Fish and Chips evaluation

Problem: how to get pupils to improve the ‘evaluation ‘ part of exam and essay answers as they move from GCSE to A level. At GCSE it is often enough to answer questions by saying ‘some people think this…others think that….and I think…’ for a conclusion. In examiner speak the ‘evaluation is implicit in a juxtaposition of different approaches.’ At A level this kind of approach will be credited but doesn’t reach the highest levels in mark schemes. Pupils sometimes struggle to see how to evaluate a range of material and come to a reasoned conclusion.

An exercise that can help is to hold a discussion on a topic that most\all pupils will have some knowledge of, one I like is ‘Which is the best fish and chip shop in Oxford?’

AO1 – what is a fish and chip shop? Demonstrate brief understanding of the kind of establishment we mean and identify a number of examples. Possibly also exclude KFC, McDonalds, etc. It may be necessary to define our terms at this point.

A02 – What are the pros and cons of the various outlets? Price, quality, proximity to home, friendly staff etc and a comparison of each shop on these criteria – this forms the bulk of the discussion – if ‘Posh Fish’ is commended for portion size, how do others compare? Is quality of fish more or less important than price? If people disagree about this how can it be resolved? Perhaps there is no single answer to the question that everyone will agree with…now we are seeing that there are not just a range of criteria to consider but also that people will disagree about which are the most important so we are no longer ‘juxtaposing’ but our analysis ‘falls out ‘of a consideration of many points (all of which should be illustrated with examples, obviously).

AO3 – the evaluation. We now, hopefully, can see that evaluation is the natural result of a proper consideration of a question from a range of perspectives (and hence not difficult or scary). Equally for those who tend to offer opinions unsupported it is apparent that evaluation can’t take place without the collection of a range of viewpoints; lack of illustration\examples spoils attempts to evaluate.

Obviously it needn’t  be fish and chips, but something easy and familiar so that you can focus on the structure of the discussion rather than the content.