1. STAGE 1- Involve students in defining the The Next Best Thing Assignment criteria that will be used to judge their performance. Involving students in Expectation of Student/Designers: determining the evaluation criteria initiates a negotiation. Neither imposing school goals Students in groups of 3 or 4 are to draft a nor acquiescing to student preferences is proposal for a concept or idea that will likely to be as successful as creating a make life better shared set that students perceive to be meaningful. Workplace studies, for Is it technology based? example, indicate that involving employees Does it make you safer? in making decisions about their work Does it entertain? increases satisfaction and goal commitment. Is it an it? In addition to increasing student What does it cost? commitment to instructional goals, Is it an improvement on negotiating intentions enables teachers to something or of something? help students set goals that are specific, Does it have to be built? immediate, and moderately difficult, Is it alive? characteristics that contribute to greater effort. It also provides an opportunity to How will it make life better influence students' orientations toward What are some potential consequences of learning, a long term guidance effort, that is creating or modify this "thing" or "creature" particularly timely in cooperative learning contexts since students sometimes adopt orientations in group learning (such as Expectation of Evaluators of concept: letting someone else do all the work) that impede learning. Evaluators (teachers and students) must decide which criteria are to be measured and develop language and method to do so. STAGE 2- Teach students how to apply the Using a Checklist or a Rubric developed criteria to their own work. If students have through collaboration between teacher and been involved in a negotiation in Stage 1, students. These tools are to be used first to the criteria that result will be an integrated inform students' actions, processes, products set of personal and school goals. Since the both in progress and final as well as goals are not entirely their own, students functioning as the standard against which need to see examples of what they mean in the final product is measured. practice. These models or examples help students understand specifically what the criteria mean to them. Teacher modeling is very important, as is providing many Teachers are to model their approach to an numerous examples of what particular activity with a standard firmly in mind and categories mean, using language that to show students how the standard informed connects criteria to evidence in the their actions, process and product creation. appraisal.

2. STAGE 3- Give students feedback on their self-evaluations. Students' initial comprehension of the criteria and how to apply them are likely to be imperfect. Teachers need to help students recalibrate their understanding by arranging for students to receive feedback (from the teacher, peers, and themselves) on their attempts to implement the criteria. Having different sources (e.g., peers and teacher) provide data for comparison helps students develop accurate self- evaluations. Discussion regarding differences in data can prove most helpful. STAGE 4- Help students develop productive goals and action plans. The most difficult part of teaching students how to evaluate their work consists of designing ways to provide support for students as they use self-evaluative data to set new goals and levels of effort. Without teacher help, students may be uncertain whether they have attained their goals. Teachers can also help students connect particular levels of achievement to the learning strategies they adopted and the effort they expended. Finally, teachers can help students develop viable action plans in which feasible goals are operationalized as a set of specific action intentions.