Editorial
The landscape of education and…
1. To J, Aluquin D and Tan KHK (2025) Making student voice heard in dialogic feedback: feedback design matters. Front. Educ. 10:1550328. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1550328
Click https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2025.1550328/full
ABSTRACT
Introduction:
Making student voice heard is crucial for productive feedback. However, this is seldom in practice in the exam-oriented context because students lack opportunities and support to give voice in feedback processes. To bridge the gap, this collaborative action research explored how feedback could be redesigned to invite student voice in a Singapore secondary school.
Methodology:
We collaborated with three Social Studies teachers to transform their error-focused practice into dialogic feedback accentuating student voice. Drawing on the Lundy model of participation and self-determination theory, the teachers designed a feedback log to let 48 secondary four (equivalent to Grade 10) learners articulate their voice and psychological needs for competence and relatedness.
Results:
Analysis of feedback logs, student focus groups and teacher interviews indicated three main aspects of student voice: (i) grades (numeric feedback) as an indicator to monitor one’s goal achievement and exam preparation efforts; (ii) challenges in making feedforward; and (iii) learners’ feedback engagement and motivation largely shaped by teacher response.
Discussion:
Given the context-dependent nature of tasks in Social Studies, verbal reciprocal exchange would be useful in developing students’ higher-order thinking skills for feedforward. Implications for productive feedback designs are discussed, and avenues for future research outlined.
2. Nieminen, J. H. (2025). How does assessment shape student identities? An integrative review. Studies in Higher Education, 50(2), 287–305. Click https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2024.2334844
ABSTRACT
Assessment of student learning is commonly understood as a seemingly objective measurement of learning outcomes. It is seen as fair that assessment targets students’ abilities – not their identities or personalities. This idea fails to acknowledge how assessment transforms its object, the students, often in unintended ways. While higher education research has largely emphasized the impact of assessment on student learning, the ontological question of how assessment shapes students has remained marginal. This is despite assessment being a part of the fabric of life in higher education: examinations, assignments, grades, rubrics, rankings, and metrics characterise the student experience. The present study addresses this knowledge gap by reviewing empirical studies on how assessment shapes student identities through a theory-driven integrative review of 32 articles (2007–2023). First, these studies are summarised to understand how they conceptualise ‘identities’, what kinds of assessment practices they depict, and what the reported influences on student identities are. Second, a conceptual synthesis provides a metatheory on how assessment transforms student identities in higher education. This theorisation suggests that assessment shapes students through the ontological mechanisms of (1) gatekeeping, (2) legitimisation, (3) concretisation, (4) socialisation and (5) individualisation. Moreover, the theorisation considers students’ own agency over their identity development. Overall, this study emphasizes the crucial, hitherto overlooked role of assessment in shaping students’ professional and personal identities in higher education. This study proposes a research agenda to better understand student identity formation in and through assessment.
3. Thomas Godfrey-Faussett & Jo-Anne Baird (2025) What does success mean to you? Negotiating individual definitions of educational success within an examination-dominated regime of truth, Oxford Review of Education, 51:2, 178-201, DOI:10.1080/03054985.2024.2439287
ABSTRACT
The meaning of education success is a complex and contested question. In England, as in many countries, this question remains dominated by high-stakes summative assessment, resulting in perverse secondary consequences, detrimental to education itself. In this study, we asked six policy-makers, seven secondary-school teachers and 17 pupils what success meant to them. We extend Broadfoot’s four Cs framework of competence, competition, content, and control, by adding ‘creation’, emphasizing how assessment creates the realities it is intended to measure. The study took a grounded theory approach, iterating data collection, literature review, and inductive analysis alongside critical input from a steering committee composed of five study participants. We argue that assessment practices in England create and proliferate a regime of truth which positions high-ranking examination results as the only legitimate meaning of educational success. In school, children discover and determine their interests, identities, and individuality. This process is negotiated with parents, peers, teachers and wider society. We highlight the role that assessment has in engendering competition, controlling choices, and creating identities. Assessment results influence both how we are perceived by others and how we perceive ourselves. We discuss the role that assessment plays in mediating identity negotiation – in shaping, legitimising, and controlling it.
4. Five decades of self assessment research
Nieminen, J. H., & Boud, D. (2025). Student self-assessment: a meta-review of five decades of research. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 32(2), 127–151. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969594X.2025.2510211
ABSTRACT
Student self-assessment has received considerable research interest. While several review articles have mapped self-assessment studies, there remains a need to synthesise the insights from field and the differing views and approaches within. In this critical meta-review, we conduct a discourse analysis of 28 earlier review studies concerning self-assessment, spanning five decades of research. We ask: What is known about student self-assessment? How have review studies produced knowledge about self-assessment? Analysing our data corpus, we deconstruct four discourses: psychological discourse (self-assessment as a clinical intervention); educational discourse (self-assessment as a contextual, relational practice); performance discourse (self-assessment as a performative practice); and societal discourse (self-assessment as a societal practice). These four discourses represent different forms of knowledge production. Through these discourses, self-assessment research has continued the history of promoting a reflective, rational and autonomous human subject in educational settings, but ironically, often through the occlusion of the self.