A long and winding path: requirements for critical thinking in project work

Be prepared for assessment, be independent, creative, connected, and critical — students doing assessed self-regulated project work face extensive demands. Such work requires considerable capacity to undertake source criticism and think critically. In this article, I examine how secondary school students relate to demands concerning source criticism and critical thinking. Drawing on Goffman's frame analysis and social/cultural risk theory, I discuss how various conceptions of “what's going on” are connected to choices to be made. Various frames that can be related to an overall notion of an opaque and ubiquitous assessment regime simultaneously come into play. In examining dilemmas and analyzing various ways of framing them, I will try to illuminate and understand the obstacles students experience connected with demands for source criticism and critical thinking in project work. Although student handling of these demands can be questioned in relation to how a critical approach is traditionally described, I claim that what we observe can also be interpreted as a rational adaptation to a different framing of what school and education are really about, that is, being a “good student” by doing what is most rewarding in terms of how the school system displays appreciation.