ABSTRACT
How good are students at evaluating their own learning? This was the focus of Learning School 3's inquiry, unearthing some penetrating and disturbing insights. What became very clear from both the quantitative data and the qualitative data from student interviews is that students can reflect on their learning but have often never been given the opportunity to do so, and have never engaged in a conversation about their learning, or rarely if ever been asked to think about the internal and external influences on their motivation. Confirmation for this comes from teachers who were also interviewed and agreed that their students were not good self-evaluators, admitting that often the pressures of time and assessment produced a collusion to just ‘get through’. It is a reminder of Entwistle's work on surface and deep learning and what he called ‘strategic’ (or tactical) learning designed for examination purposes and not for life after school.
