A five-year interview study turns judgement-words club volunteers already use, such as tended, ready and still usable, into the School of Continuous Improvement's new scored assessment standard.
Five years of interviews across allotments, choirs, sheds, sporting clubs and raffle stalls yield the School's newest scored standard
The School of Continuous Improvement’s new Impact Report 2021–2026 sets out what may be its least conventional instrument yet: an assessment standard built not from a checklist, but from the words committees already reach for when a checklist isn’t to hand.
The School reads the standard’s arrival as confirmation of what five years of listening was always going to yield: a vocabulary of judgement worth measuring on its own terms.
The Evaluation of Evaluation program spent five years sitting in on the ordinary judgement calls of committee life — an allotment plot signed off as tended, a choir section pronounced ready, a shed tool called still usable, a raffle-stall volunteer named the person you’d ask again — and recorded those judgement-words as data in their own right, rather than converting them into a survey scale first. The resulting Tacit Judgement Index abstracts that vocabulary into a scored instrument, which the School has adopted as the assessment standard for its community-partnership funding round.
A volunteer who says a tool is “still usable” has already done the assessment. We have only just written down what they were scoring.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation
Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, said the Index’s contribution was to give a vocabulary the School had previously logged as anecdote a place on the same scoring ladder as everything else it measures.
Senior Lecturer Thandiwe Solberg, Convenor of Demo Quarter, said the funding round would be the Index’s first real test: “we built it to score a judgement, not to replace one, and the round is where we find out whether that holds.”
The full impact report is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.emj5nd.