Revaluation Reviews

Critical Evaluation

Hulme, J.A. (2004). Critical Evaluation: A Student Guide. Psychology Review, 10, 6-8.

What is critical evaluation?

Critical evaluation is a process of assessing the relative merit of a piece of work, which may have been presented as a journal article, in a text book, on the internet, in a radio or television article, or in just about any other format (for academic purposes, this will usually be written, but could include seminar presentations). You are being asked to decide and discuss what is good, and what is bad, about the arguments being presented to you. Critical evaluation is not about picking fault, it is about deciding how useful and worthwhile the work, methodology and the arguments presented are; deciding how much the work has contributed to your understanding, or the world’s understanding, of a topic. The crucial word is “evaluate” – to measure the value of something. You will find it extremely useful to be able to critically evaluate your own work, or to work together with a peer to do so for each other, and so identify and improve on weaknesses in your coursework prior to submission. To see good examples of critical evaluation, try reading the introductions of some published articles in business journals.

Asking questions

A major part of critical evaluation is learning to ask questions of the text you are reading. At first, students tend to assume that just because something has been published, it must be true. This is understandable, but it is not the case, and is not a helpful way to approach your reading. Authors of papers and books are human, they make mistakes, they sometimes misunderstand or draw incorrect conclusions, and they often have their own agenda, which biases their opinions and thus the arguments they are making. To do well in academic work, you need to learn to spot problems like these. This gets easier with practice, and also if you read several texts on the same subject, as this will...