Evaluative conduct in teacher–student supervision: When students assess their own performance

The practice of evaluating one’s own performance or that of another is ubiquitous across workplace and institutional settings and is foundational to the educational endeavour. In contrast to the traditional dynamic of teachers assessing students’ performance, however, this paper focuses on how students evaluate their own performance in feedback meetings. Using conversation analysis, we investigate two Scandinavian educational settings in which students evaluate, reflect on and assess their own work. Analysis focuses on how evaluative practices are initiated and/or elicited by teachers, and how they align with or disrupt conversation analytic norms around self-assessment. We found that doing evaluation presents interactional challenges for those eliciting, doing and responding to it, despite the core nature of assessment in educational settings. We discuss the implications for preference organisation in specialised institutional settings and seek to understand what counts as assessment and evaluation in real pedagogic events.