Article Alerts (Feb 2023)

Tan, K.H.K. (2022) Lessons from a disciplined response to COVID-19 disruption to education: beginning the journey from reliability to resilience, Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, https://doi.org/10.1080/0969594X.2022.2162480

Assessment systems reward certainty and thrive on predictability. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has punished our assessment systems severely for overreliance on controlled premises for our high-stakes assessment, and this should compel us to re-examine the reliance on certainty and control in our assessment policies and reforms. Singapore is a useful context to examine such reexamination of assessment imperatives on a national scale. The city-state typically orchestrates its major policy reform with great discipline, standardisation, and detailed coordination. However, such qualities may not be ideal for its assessment reform needs in the post-pandemic future. Three recent assessment reforms are examined as examples of pre-pandemic assessment policies predicated on certainty. This paper discusses whether such reforms are fit for post-pandemic purpose(s), and argues for shifting the emphasis of assessment from securing examination reliability to developing learners’ assessment resilience. 

Arnold, J. (2022). Prioritising students in Assessment for Learning: A scoping review of research on students’ classroom experience. Review of Education, 10, e3366. https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3366
 

Assessment for Learning (AfL) is important in policy and practice in secondary schooling across the globe. It is associated with teacher expertise, student agency, a dialogic classroom climate, and a commitment to the needs of all learners. Research about AfL often includes measuring the efficacy of selected practices or foregrounding the role and experience of teachers. Less prominent is literature examining student experience, which is problematic, given AfL’s generally agreed aim of orienting learners as evidence seekers, interpreters, and decision-makers. This scoping review examined 75 empirical studies published since 2002 that provided evidence of the lived experiences of secondary school students when teachers facilitated AfL pedagogical practices. A conceptualisation of student experience as comprising six interrelated dimensions, ranging from recognition of classroom practices to integration with experiences beyond the classroom, is proposed in the thematic arrangement of results. Findings show student experience as responsive to changes in teacher practice when students are co-practitioners of AfL and developers of disciplinary expertise. The pedagogic power of students as evaluators is affirmed evidence that positive student evaluation of the worth or value of a practice is an important precondition for productive student experience. AfL further contributes to a generative experience of learning when it enhances dialogic interactions, with students and teachers as partners in moving learning forward. Inclusive AfL and discipline-specific AfL practices are evident but under-represented in the field. 

Fernández-Ruiz, J., Panadero, E., & García-Pérez, D. (2021) Assessment from a disciplinary approach: design and implementation in three undergraduate programmes, Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 28:5-6, 703-723, https://doi.org/10.1080/0969594X.2021.1999210 

The role of the academic discipline is a major factor in assessment design and implementation in higher education. Unfortunately, a clear understanding of how teachers fro different disciplines approach assessment is still missing; this information can lead to teacher training programmes that are better designed and more focussed. The present study compared assessment design and implementation in three programmes (sport science, mathematics, and medicine) each representing a discipline from 4 Spanish universities. Using a mixed-methods approach, data from syllabi (N = 385) and semi-structured interviews with teachers (N = 19) were analysed. The results showed different approaches to assessment design and implementation in each programme in two main axes: summative or formative purposes of assessment, and content-based or authentic assessment. Implications for further research are discussed. 

Winstone, N., Boud, D., Dawson, P., & Heron, M. (2022). From feedback-as-information to feedback-as-process: a linguistic analysis of the feedback literature. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 47(2), 213-230, https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2021.1902467  

Feedback is a term used so frequently that it is commonly taken that there is a shared view about what it means. However, in recent years, the notion of feedback as simply the provision of information to students about their work has been substantially challenged and learning-centred views have been articulated. This paper employs a corpus linguistics approach to analyse the use of the term ‘feedback’ in research articles published in key higher education journals on the topic over two five-year periods: 2009–2013 and 2015–2019. Analysis focused on the most common noun modifiers of ‘feedback’ and nouns modified by ‘feedback’, verbs with ‘feedback’ as the object, possessors of ‘feedback’, and prepositions representing an action or concept on or with ‘feedback’. Whilst the analysis demonstrated that transmission-focused conceptions dominate publications on feedback, linguistic signifiers of a shift over time in representation of feedback away from a transmission-focus towards a learning-focus were evident within each grammatical relation category. The data indicate that the term ‘feedback’ is used by different authors to refer to very different representations of the concept, and the paper proposes that greater clarity in the representation of feedback is needed. 

Guskey, T. R. (2022). Can grades be an effective form of feedback? Phi Delta Kappan, 104(3), 36-41. 

Although grades are often portrayed as detrimental to students’ motivation and interest in learning, a closer analysis of the evidence indicates that when used appropriately, grades can be a meaningful and effective form of feedback. Thomas R. Guskey clarifies how studies on grades are frequently misinterpreted, explains how grades offer important but insufficient information on students’ learning progress and describes conditions that must be met for grades to serve as a meaningful and effective form of feedback for students. 

van der Kleij, F. M. (2019). Comparison of teacher and student perceptions of formative assessment feedback practices and association with individual student characteristics. Teaching and Teacher Education, 85, 175-189, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2019.06.010  

This study (1) investigated similarities and differences in feedback perceptions among teachers and students and (2) explored the association between individual student characteristics and students’ feedback perceptions. Survey data were collected from 59 teachers and 186 students in secondary English and mathematics classes in five Australian schools. Feedback quality was perceived more positively by teachers than students, and English teachers reported higher levels of facilitation of feedback use than students. Student self-reported levels of self-efficacy, intrinsic values and self-regulation predicted students’ perceptions of feedback quality. These individual student characteristics mediated the relationship between student achievement levels and feedback quality perceptions. 

Lipnevich, A. A., Panadero, E., & Calistro, T. (2022). Unraveling the effects of rubrics and exemplars on student writing performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000434  

Teachers across educational systems struggle to find time to provide quality feedback to their students. Asking students to create their own feedback has been shown to enhance students’ performance. In this experimental study, we explored the effects of rubrics and exemplars on writing performance, encouraging students to employ these tools for self-feedback generation. Two hundred six 9th- and 10th-grade students participated. Students were asked to write an essay and revise it based on the information provided to them under four conditions: control, rubrics, exemplars, and combined condition (rubrics and exemplars). After submitting the revised version of their essay, students in experimental conditions were trained on how to use rubrics and/or exemplars. Students were then asked to write another essay and revise it based on the information consistent with their experimental group membership (i.e., control, rubric, exemplars, combined). We found that students in the rubrics condition benefited the most, closely followed by students in the exemplars condition, and then the combined condition. The performance across conditions was somewhat variable for the three performance outcomes. Furthermore, the improvement in the usage of the tools following the training session was the highest for the exemplars condition. We conclude that teachers can encourage students to use both rubrics and exemplars to generate self-feedback and improve performance. This way, teachers’ workload can be significantly decreased.  

Eriksson, K., Lindvall, J., Helenius, O., & Ryve, A. (2020). Cultural variation in the effectiveness of feedback on students’ mistakes.  Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 3053.  .

One of the many things teachers do is to give feedback on their students’ work. Feedback pointing out mistakes may be a key to learning, but it may also backfire. We hypothesized that feedback based on students’ mistakes may have more positive effects in cultures where teachers have greater authority over students, which we assume to be cultures that are high on power distance and religiosity. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed data from 49 countries taking part in the 2015 wave of the TIMSS assessment, in which students in the 4th and 8th grades were asked whether their teachers in mathematics and science told them how to do better when they had made a mistake. For each country, we could then estimate the association between the reported use of mistake-based feedback and student achievement. Consistent with our hypothesis, the estimated effect of mistake-based feedback was positive only in certain countries, and these countries tended to be high on power distance and religiosity. These results highlight the importance of cultural values in educational practice.