Assessment, feedback, and

learning

Fiona Patrick
Assessment and learning
This lecture will discuss

• Assessment and learning: how might assessment influence learning?

• Feedback and learning: what is feedback and how might it support learning?
Assessment and learning

Fiona Patrick
Assessment and learning inter-relationships
Black and Wiliam (2018)
Assessment and learning
• Graded summative assessments tend to encourage performativity in
students: that is, they can lead to surface and instrumental learning
• Students may prioritise assessment tasks at the expense of engaging with
teaching and learning (Jessop & Tomas, 2017)
• Where assessment shifts towards assessment for learning it should support
learning by involving students in dialogue about their learning and
encourage students to take a proactive approach to their learning
(Rodriguez-Gomez & Ibarra-Saiz, 2015)
• Assessment activities should be designed to be appropriately challenging
and authentic (Rodriguez-Gomez & Ibarra-Saiz, 2015)
 Assessment and learning
To support learning assessment tasks should:
• Involve an appropriate level of challenge for
learners: engage learners in sensemaking, enquiry,
questioning, exploration.
• Enable students to demonstrate their learning:
including knowledge, understanding, ideas, skills
etc.
• Create authentic and transferable assessment
activities that support connection to ‘real world’
(Gore et al, 2009)
Feedback and learning
Some context on feedback
• Early feedback theories tended to be aligned
with behaviourism: seen as corrective
feedback immediately following a task
• Seen as part of instructional design
• This simplistic view of feedback evolved into
the idea of iterative feedback – with
feedback ‘loops’: see Lipnevich & Panadero
(2021) for the graphic
 Some context on feedback
• Importance of i) Bloom (1968) and ii) Sadler (1989) in
linking feedback to formative assessment
• Sadler (1989) stated:
‘Broadly speaking, feedback provides for two main audiences,
the teacher and the student. Teachers use feedback to make
programmatic decisions with respect to readiness, diagnosis
and remediation. Students use it to monitor the strengths and
weaknesses of their performances, so that aspects associated
with success or high quality can be recognized and reinforced,
and unsatisfactory aspects modified or improved.’
 Let’s start with what feedback is not….
• Don’t confuse feedback with praise (‘well done you worked hard’; ‘that poster
looks really good – nice visuals’)
• Yvonne mentioned personal and task-focused praise in her lecture: feedback is
something different
• Feedback is not advice on learning or performance nor is it evaluation of learning
or performance (‘This is a very good assignment.’)
• Is not critique – this is evaluative and looks back: feedback (despite the name)
feeds forward, providing specific information to support future learning
What do we mean by feedback?
Feedback can be defined as
• information given by a teacher to students about their performance that
aims to improve learning (EEF, 2021)
• ‘information communicated to the learner that is intended to modify the
learner’s thinking or behaviour for the purpose of improving learning’
(Shute, in Leighton, 2019)
• a contextual and social process (Jensen et al., 2022)
What do we mean by feedback?
• Feedback should be linked to the goals or purposes of the learning: the
goal or purposes should be clearly stated for students
• It is designed to reduce the gap between current learning/performance
and the desired goal or purpose of the learning
• It should be specific, clear and actionable
• It should be timely – that is should occur at an appropriate time to
support progression in learning towards the learning goal or purpose
 What do we mean by feedback?
‘a teacher may provide feedback to a student, a student
may provide feedback to a classmate, the teacher or
themselves, or an online instruction environment may
provide feedback to a student. The educational purpose
of feedback is to provide advice to students to improve
learning. Feedback can help students identify and
address misconceptions, and develop more effective
strategies within the learning being addressed and
metacognitively when engaging with the feedback to
develop strategies to improve their learning…’
Van der Kleij et al., (2017)
Effective feedback and learning
To be effective, research indicates that feedback should be:
• Part of an overall approach to quality teaching and learning (including effective
use of formative assessment and/or assessment for learning) (EEF, 2021)
• Given at a point where it can support learners to progress in their learning:
identifying areas for improvement and encouraging reflection on how to improve
(Brooks et al., 2020)
• Specific and meaningful (rather than vague and unrelated to the learning tasks or
processes): quality not quantity counts (Brooks et al., 2020)
• Given in a classroom environment which encourages students to see feedback as
helpful for learning and provides opportunities for students to reflect on and use
the feedback in practice (Education Endowment Fund 2021)
Effective feedback and learning
Effective feedback should be designed to support self-regulated learning:

‘Self-regulated learning involves goal-directed activities that students

instigate, modify, and sustain… for example, attending to instruction,
processing of information, rehearsing and relating new learning to prior
knowledge, believing that one is capable of learning, and establishing
productive social relationships and work environments.’
Schunk & Zimmerman (2003)
Effective feedback and learning

Self-regulated learning is underpinned by two assumptions (Dann, 2014):

1) Learners are active constructors of learning.
2) Learners can regulate aspects of their cognition, motivation and
behaviours to enhance learning.
Effective feedback and learning
Dawson et al. (2021) argue that:
• Students need to develop capabilities to make the most of feedback
opportunities.
• Teachers should support students to develop ‘feedback literacy’
• Feedback is only effective if the student understands it and acts upon it to
support further learning or improved performance.
• Issue of summative feedback at end of a university course: it may be too
late to support learning.
 Things to bear in mind…
• Effective feedback can support student learning: but issues such as student
confidence, self-esteem, and sense of trust in the teacher may affect how a
student receives feedback. (See EEF report, 2021)
• Effects of feedback are highly variable: some research indicates medium
positive statistical effectives on learning but may also have negative effects
(Brooks et al., 2019; Wisniewski et al., 2020)
• Students can find feedback unhelpful and where it is given alongside a
grade, students can see it as simply justifying the level of grade given (see
Jensen et al., 2021)
• As well as providing feedback we need to ask and answer the question: how
do students make meaning from the feedback they are given?
 Things to bear in mind…
Definitions of feedback tend to make it sound like a simple process – so, last word
to Sadler (1989):

‘Feedback is commonly defined in terms of information given to the student about

the quality of performance (knowledge of results). But in many educational and
training contexts, students produce work which cannot be assessed simply as correct
or incorrect. The quality of the work is determined by direct qualitative human
judgment. The traditional definition of feedback is then too narrow to be of much use,
and in this article a more appropriate conception is presented. It requires knowledge
of the standard or goal, skills in making multicriterion comparisons, and the
development of ways and means for reducing the discrepancy between what is
produced and what is aimed for.’
references
• Paul Black & Dylan Wiliam (2018) Classroom assessment and pedagogy, Assessment in Education: Principles,
Policy & Practice, 25:6, 551-575, DOI:10.1080/0969594X.2018.1441807

• Brooks, C., Carroll, A., Gillies, R. M., & Hattie, J. (2019). A Matrix of Feedback for Learning. Australian Journal of
Teacher Education, 44(4)

• Dawson, P., Carless, D. & Lee, P.P.W. (2021) Authentic feedback: supporting learners to engage in disciplinary
feedback practices. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 46(2): 286-296

• Education Endowment Fund (2021) Teacher feedback to improve learning: guidance report.

• Jensen, L.X., Bearman, M. & Boud, D. (2022) Feedback encounters: towards a framework for analysing and
understanding feedback processes. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. Online first: DOI:
10.1080/02602938.2022.2059446

• Jessop, T. & Tomas, C. (2017) The implications of programme assessment patterns for student learning,
Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 42(6): 990-999
references
Leighton, J.P. (2019) Students’ Interpretation of formative assessment feedback Three claims for why we know so
little about something so important. Journal of Educational Measurement 56(4): 793-814

Sadler, D.R. (1989) Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems .

Schunk, D. & Zimmerman, B.J. (2003) Self-regulation and learning. In W.M. Reynolds & G.E. Miller (Eds.) Handbook
of Psychology. Volume 7: Educational Psychology. John Wiley & Sons Inc: New Jersey. Chapter 4: 59-78