Description: The paper addresses the conference theme by contributing with empirical knowledge about the students' participation in developing criteria for peer-response as part of a written examination. The research question is: How do students approach an assignment where development of criteria is included, and what impact does students' work with criteria have on the students' learning potential? Norway has largely followed up the Bologna Process by implementing the Quality Reform at all higher education institutions in Norway from 2003. According to the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, some of the main points of the reform are that priority is to be given to a combination of teaching methods involving a high level of student activity, new forms of assessment and regular feedback that promotes learning. Still, it seems to be a lack of experiences in Norwegian higher education on teaching methods involving a high level of student activity in the assessment process. Coincidental, lots of issues related to assessment, e.g. criteria are made current by student-active study-methods as writing-groups and peer-assessment. Discussions of explicit criteria are often couched in language from an instrumental view of education. By using socio-cultural theory, there is a need to change the discourse and focus on how students can be involved in criteria work as a way of improving learning (Dysthe, et al, 2005). The project's theoretical framework is socio-cultural theory initiated by Vygotsky (1978) emphasizing the influences of cultural and social contexts, and supports a discovery model of learning. The concepts zone of proximal development (ibid) and schaffolding (Wood, et al 1976) are appropriate to analyse the processes which took place in the project presented in this paper. According to social-cultural theory, students' engagement in developing criteria should be regarded as an integrated part of the learning process (Dysthe, 2003). Olga Dysthe (Dysthe et al, 2001) presents the importance of dialogue in learning activities. Following her work, I regard the students' development of criteria for formative assessment as an important instrument for learning. (329 w) Methodology: In autumn 2005 I studied how 200 undergraduate students at the Faculty of Education, accomplished a four weeks examination, containing three parts: 1) Writing an individual professional text. 2) Doing a written group discussion on criteria, aimed to agree on three criteria for the professional text. 3) Writing a peer-response based on the certain criteria. The criteria discussion (2) constituted an important focus in the study. This study is a continuation of the project Writing Groups in Early Childhood Education (Holte Haug, 2005a, 2005b). I collected data through participatory observation, logbook and descriptions of selected situations, in addition to interview and surveys/questionnaires. In addition, the data-material consists of a number of students' texts; professional texts, peer-responses and criteria-discussions. Due to my role as both a lecturer on the course, the students' supervisor, and the leader of the project, I had the opportunity to discuss continuously with the students, and hereby I gained valuable information. (154 w) Conclusions: Even though the issue in its origin is formative assessment, both the necessity of a distinction between formative and summative assessment and their mutual dependency, are among the issues that will be discussed in the paper. Another issue concerns higher education's responsibility to encourage learning-cultures, where students are expected to have an active role in negotiations with each other, and with their teachers about the content and form of the criteria. Based on analyses of the data-material, the aim is to shed light on how the students approached an assignment including the development of criteria, and to draw preliminary conclusions on how the criteria work improved the students' learning. (109 w)