Develop student assessment literacy

Formative feedback

It all started when I attended Kim Edwards’s session, Changing the narrative about student expectations, formative evaluation and feedback, at the IB Conference in Yokohama in 2017. I was very inspired by how the school (Presbyterian Ladies College) has translated Hattie’s research and taken actions to examine the process of giving and receiving feedback between teachers and students. Feedback should be designed to enhance learning and empower students to take risks for self-improvement. Formative feedback is far more powerful than summative feedback.

We publish narrative reports twice a year at my school and the investment on return is simply too low. Teachers are so stressed during the reporting period and parents and students might not always read or understand the comments provided. Time should be strategically spent on designing learning engagements that help students develop conceptual understanding, approaches to learning skills, building relationships, and so on. The narrative report comments are summative feedback and they provide little use for students as they have already moved on learning a new unit. 

Nevertheless, I also understand that it will be unrealistic to completely drop this practice (writing narrative report card comments). If we have not made learning visible to students and parents, the narrative report cards function as a tool to provide an overview of the student’s learning over a period of time. More and more schools share their practices of providing formative feedback and ditching the narrative report cards. However, I was not able to find a detailed process or implementation to support this paradigm shift. I want to change this practice and encourage teachers to invest energy in helping students develop effective learner qualities through formative feedback. Feedback is a powerful way to affect student achievement (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). What’s most important is that students must understand the feedback and act upon it.

I proposed that the school run a pilot project on formative assessment and feedback. Teachers who are interested in this project can join voluntarily. We also want to increase teacher agency in professional development through this pilot. When we just started last year, we had no idea how this might work and simply followed Hattie’s feedback system, Feed Up, Feed Back, and Feed Forward. After one year of piloting, we gradually revised our goal and developed our model. A useful step for me was to interview every teacher at the beginning of this school year to help refine and create a more focusing goal. This somehow turns into action research now based on my curiosity to compare the students’ performance and achievement based on the intervention implemented.

We focus on intentionality, craftsmanship, and collaboration required from both the teacher and student through this project. These are the key three ingredients to increase development for all parties, including parents. For teachers, our goals are to develop effective pedagogical practices, design purposeful and meaningful formative assessments and learn how to provide “effective” feedback. “Effective” feedback means the comments that students can understand and are actionable. The feedback should also be provided in time.

Feed Up, Back, Forward

We continue with our process of trial and error. Students and teachers often feel that recording the process is very tedious. It is also clear that many students still lack of the ‘language’ to set effective goals. This has guided us to explore the quality of effective learners. Meanwhile, my team and I have worked on a simple version to support the feed up, back and forward process. We have come up with G.R.I.T Feedback form for this feedback system. Both teachers and students can write or record their goal setting and the process of giving and receiving feedback. We called it GRIT as we want students to develop a growth mindset perseverance for their goals. There are also many learner qualities that can not be assessed via summative assessment, and we want to highlight this and help students discover their strengths and areas for growth. This is our second iteration for the project, and we will begin our discourse analysis as a qualitative approach to our action research once we collect the data.