Unravelling workplace educators’ judgement processes when assessing student performance

Assessing workplace learning by workplace educators is a complex and inherently social process, as the workplace is a participatory learning environment. We therefore propose seeing assessment as a process of judgement embedded in a community of practice and to this purpose apply the philosophy of inferentialism to unravel the judgement process of workplace educators by approaching it as an interrelated system of judgements, actions and reasons. Since we aimed at studying a process, we applied a longitudinal holistic case study design. Results show that educators are engaged in a constant judgement process during which they use multiple and adaptive frames of reference when forming their judgement about students. Further, we found that during this process educators form an overarching image of students which develops throughout placement, and that their judgements go hand in hand with their actions relating to fostering independent practice.