The photocopied student responses to the first and last practicals of the year (practicals 1 and 4) were used as our raw data. Each evaluation activity on the lab practicals was designed to evoke the use of a particular evaluative strategy. Therefore, student responses to each question were coded in order to measure the level of performance with a specific evaluative strategy. The coding assigned an integer between 0 and 3 to each student response. Similarly, students’ answers to the conceptual questions were coded on an ordinal scale from 0-3 using a taxonomy developed by the course teaching assistants