ABSTRACT
The skill of evaluation in 'Working scientifically' requires children to develop the ability to reflect on and make judgements on the process and outcomes of an investigation against a definite set of criteria which may be related to what they have done or how they have done something, and the relevance of what they have found out in relation to answering the question. It is one of the cognitive domains located towards the pinnacle of Bloom's taxonomy: remember, comprehend, understand, apply, analyse and evaluate. For these reasons evaluation is a very challenging set of skills for children and unless they have been taught how to evaluate, the most one can hope for is a superficial comment or two about how easy or difficult they found the investigation or if they worked well or not. The development is reflected in the age-related expectations (ARE) of the National Curriculum in England: Science programmes of study.
