Assessment and feedback plays an important role in motivating both teacher and student for better learning experience. Assessment and feedback needs to be both ways i.e. both teachers and student needs to provide assessment and feedback. Here, the word assessment may not be relevant in case of teacher rather feedback would be better.
Let’s try to understand what does assessment and feedback mean to a teacher. Assessment refers to the information given to a learner about his/her progress in studies while feedback refers to the information given to a learner on his assessment. For example, let’s have a look on the following picture (this is my own picture, this was the example that came to my mind during the online teaching practice in explaining the difference between assessment and feedback. However, during the teaching practice I explained on words, but in the blog I put it as picture as well. ).
The purpose of assessment and feedback is to find a justified ground for some corrective actions, it could be consideration of personalized teaching and learning methods, more exercise, changes to teaching materials for example. The act of assessment and feedback is carried out for four main reason, they are, for controlling and monitoring the teaching and learning, for predicting the future learning growth of students, for motivating learner, and to find the areas where further development is needed. The intended assessment could be quantitative (as shown in the figure above) or qualitative, for example, pass/fail/accepted, and so on. Likewise, feedback needs to be provided on specific i.e. concrete rather than general.
For a better teaching and learning experience the act of assessment and feedback needs to be periodic i.e. at least couple of times during the time of course implementation.
Assessment can be made in two forms, first competence assessment and the second learning in progress. Here competence assessment refers to the examination or demonstration of the knowledge what a student have learned, it also helps a teacher to evaluate his/her teaching methods, materials and so on. Likewise, the assessment of learning in progress refers to the examination of current learning methods and its impact in students learning i.e. how well students are learning, are they benefitted, and so on.
The assessment methods could be formative and summative, the purpose and the difference between these two methods can be shown in the following figure:
However, some people (Here, by some people I am trying to refer to our discussion during the online teaching practice, we had a short discussion that should we consider the final grade as an assessment or not? ) does not consider final grade as an assessment, but in my opinion it’s a part of assessment. As shown in the figure, formative assessment is the basis for feedback to students while final grade represents the entire progress of studies of a student and his/her competence in a particular subject. In this context Bailey and Garner 2010) says that the usefulness of formative assessment depends upon the institutional policies and departmental practices. This means the process and the methods of formative assessment needs to be clearly defined.
The act of assessment differs from society to society, for example the grading of students is avoided in Finnish education system, however the teacher are supposed to make an assessment of their student learning progress and provide them some feedback for better learning experience. On the other hand in Indian education system grading is very important, the student needs to be ranked on the basis of the grades they obtain in the assessment process.
In conclusion, it is reasonable to say that the assessment and feedback is a very important part of education system. It helps not only students to make improvement in their studies but also the teachers in developing better teaching materials and the learning environment. However, one needs to understand that assessment and feedback does not guarantee better performance in every context and for every students (Evans, 2013). Therefore, maybe individualized assessment might be better, at least I think so.
Note: I have commented blog’s of Arup, Imran, and Waheed.
Reference:
Bailey, R., & Garner, M. (2010). Is the feedback in higher education assessment worth the paper it is written on? Teachers’ reflections on their practices. Teaching in Higher Education, 15(2), 187-198.
Evans, C. (2013). Making sense of assessment feedback in higher education. Review of educational research, 83(1), 70-120.
My Journey to Vocational Teacher Education 2019-20 