School Assessment: Building and Evidencing Your Folio
School assessment in Stage 2 Women's Studies is where you build the evidence base that external assessment later draws on. The assessed tasks typically combine a folio of responses to sources, a negotiated investigation, and a practical or advocacy product, all judged against performance standards that reward knowledge and understanding, application, analysis, and evaluation.
You must be able to name and use the core concepts: gender as a socially constructed category distinct from biological sex; patriarchy and structural power; intersectionality, meaning that gender never operates alone but intersects with race, class, ability, sexuality, and culture; feminism as a plural tradition rather than a single position; and agency, the capacity of women to act and resist within constraint. Add representation and discourse, since so much evidence you will analyse is textual or media based.
Common traps are predictable. Students describe a source instead of analysing it; assert that a stereotype is 'wrong' without explaining whose interests it serves; treat intersectionality as a synonym for 'diversity'; and conflate sex and gender when discussing data. A second trap is unsupported generalisation: claims such as 'society has always expected women to be carers' need a source, a date, or a named example.
A reliable rule of thumb for every folio entry is the three-move paragraph: state the claim, anchor it in specific evidence, then evaluate what the evidence can and cannot show. For example, in analysing a 1950s advertisement showing a woman beside a new appliance, do not merely note the stereotype. Identify the discourse, ask which audience and economy it served, and note the limitation that one advertisement cannot represent all women's experience, particularly those excluded by race or class. This move from description to evaluation is what separates a satisfactory response from an excellent one. Negotiate your investigation question early and narrowly, and keep a log of sources so your bibliography and reflection are accurate.
Worked rule of thumb
Claim, evidence, evaluation, in that order, for every paragraph. If a paragraph lacks one of the three moves, rewrite it before submitting.