Comparative judgement in education research

Educational researchers often need to construct precise and reliable measurement scales of complex and varied representations such as participants’ written work, videoed lesson segments and policy documents. Developing such scales using can be resource-intensive and time-consuming, and the outcomes are not always reliable. Here we present alternative methods based on comparative judgement (CJ) that have been growing in popularity over recent years. We consider the contexts in which CJ-based methods are appropriate before describing in detail what they are and how they can be applied to construct measurement scales in a range of educational research contexts. We also provide an overview to evaluating the reliability and validity of the resultant measurement scales.