Designing Quality Assessment Feedback Practices in
Schools
Dr Rachel Goh
ISBN 9789813130265
This book examines the principles of quality assessment feedback design and the related practice of engaging students in feedback. It seeks to answer the following questions: What constitutes effective assessment feedback? What should assessment feedback do for students’ learning outcomes and learner growth? How can assessment feedback practices support students’ learning in the present and beyond?
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DeLuca, C., Donaldson, G. Hayward, L., Tan, K., & Wyatt-Smith, C. (2021). Imperatives for a Better Assessment Future During and Post COVID. International Educational Assessment Network. https://www.iean.network/Reports-Publications/
This paper examines the role of assessment as a key driver of change and provides research-informed advice for policy makers and education leaders working towards the creation of a better education future post COVID. A range of disruptions to education are identified, and five imperatives are posited for ensuring the fitness of education for economic survival, ethical citizenship, and personal wellbeing in an increasingly unpredictable and challenging future.
Imperative 1. Align what is identified in the curriculum as important for young people with what is assessed or examined: Assess and therefore drive learning that students will need to succeed in the future.
Imperative 2. Keep accountability systems designed to evaluate the efficacy of policy and practice focused on system level learning and improvement rather than judgement, comparison and categorization.
Imperative 3. Identify, monitor and respond to the impact of assessment on wellbeing and plan for positive impact.
Imperative 4. Use technology to support learning not as a substitute for teacher decision-making and dialogue with learners.
Imperative 5. Execute a comprehensive and inclusive plan to improve understanding of 21st century assessment within and across communities.
Tang T. Heng & Lynn Song (2021): At
the intersection of educational change and borrowing: teachers implementing
learner-centred education in Singapore, Compare: A Journal of Comparative
and International Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2021.1910014
The lived realities of agents involved in educational borrowing or transfer are often omitted as research and discussions reside predominantly at a macro level. Through the lens of a comparative educational change framework synthesising concepts in educational change and comparative education, this study examines the lived experiences of teachers in Singapore implementing differentiated instruction, a form of learner-centred education, borrowed from the U.S. Interviewing and observing teachers, we found that they experienced postmodern and political tensions around sociocultural expectations of teaching, learning, and learners. Simultaneously, they struggled with technological considerations like structural conditions in schools and insecurities around their competencies. These findings spell implications for how we support teachers involved in educational borrowing professionally, intellectually, and emotionally. Educational borrowing on the ground can benefit from the consideration of technological, sociocultural, political, and postmodern perspectives of educational change.
Wong, H. M., Kwek, D., & Tan, K. (2020) Changing assessments and the examination culture in Singapore: A review and analysis of Singapore’s assessment policies, Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 40(4), 433-457. https://doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2020.1838886
Assessment in education occurs for different purposes – formative, summative, diagnostic, and each with different focus on educational process, education outcomes, and developmental reasons. Researchers in Singapore have documented the existence of tensions between the entrenched high-stakes examinations and attempts to introduce new modes of assessments such as Assessment for Learning practices, partly because policy attempts to change assessments invariably clash with the examination culture in Singapore. This article reviews and critically analyses assessment policies and their attendant precedents and consequences in order to better understand why these tensions around assessment exists. Drawing from institutional theory and the model of gradual institutional change, the review covers an extended period of over 150 years of assessment policies in order to show how the policy layering and conversion processes are attempting to drive both assessment changes and systemic tensions. The article will discuss how parents as a significant policy actor not only constrain policy intentions but create new institutional mechanisms that perpetuate these tensions.
Yan, Z., Li, Z., Panadero, E., Yang, M., Yang, L., & Lao, H. (2021). A systematic review on factors influencing teachers’ intentions and implementations regarding formative assessment. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 1-33. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969594X.2021.1884042
Teachers are playing crucial roles in the implementation of formative assessment, which has been widely recognised as a valuable strategy in enhancing students’ learning outcomes. However, systematic analysis on factors that might facilitate or hinder teachers’ intentions and implementations regarding formative assessment is scarce. This review covers 52 eligible studies and identifies factors, which have been categorised into personal and contextual factors, that influence teachers’ intentions and implementations regarding formative assessment. The results of this review may benefit researchers, school leaders, and policy makers when they aspire to facilitate the implementation of formative assessment.