Assessed, independent, creative and connected. The demands on students doing assessed self-regulated work are extensive. They are supposed to produce texts that require them to master a variety of competences such as genre knowledge, writing skills, ability to value and to use several institutional resources. The demands on their capacity to exercise source criticism and to think critically can be considered to be substantial in these modes of work.

In this article I examine how secondary schools students relate to demands concerning criticism of sources and critical thinking. The students are studied in situations where teachers and tutors are not physically present. Drawing on Goffman’s frame analysis and socio-cultural risk theory we discuss how different apprehensions on “what’s going on” correlates with estimations on potential dangers connected with choices that has to be made. Different laminations of frameworks are put in play which can be related to an overall notion of an opaque andubiquitousregime of assessment. In looking at dilemma situations, analysing different ways of framing, we will try to illuminate and understand obstacles students experience connected with demands for source criticism and critical thinking in self-regulated work. If the students’ handling of demands placed upon them in some ways can be questioned in relation to a critical approach, we claim that what can be seen also can be described as a rational adaptation to a different framing of what school and education really are about.

The empirical material has been drawn from video recorded sessions where students are participating in collaborative writing. Our data consists of 60 hours of video filmed interaction collected over a three year period. The filmed interactions were then merged with films of screen activity and analyzed in Transana.