You are welcome to join us for a talk from external speaker Professor Ian Jones, Department of Mathematics Education, Loughborough University.

Comparative judgement and educational research questions

Answering research questions related to teaching and learning often requires quantifying important but nebulous constructs such as conceptual understanding, the quality of an explanation, problem solving skills, and many others. A technique called comparative judgement offers an efficient approach that has been shown to produce robust outcomes across a range of educational studies. It is relatively straightforward to implement, and involves presenting assessors with pairs of objects, such as pieces of student writing, and asking them which of the two is ‘better’. We then fit a statistical model to the pairwise decisions in order to produce a measurement scale. In this talk I will introduce the technique, provide examples of its application to educational studies, and offer some practical tips for addressing your own research questions. We’ll also have a go at making some pairwise judgements ourselves.

Jones, I. & Davies, B. (2024). Comparative judgement in education research. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 47(2), 170–181.