Feedback Strategies from a Student's Perspective
This classroom research project examines the effectiveness of formative feedback strategies in discussion classes. Formative feedback is a form of feedback where students identify their language problem and are given a chance to practice their weakness (Tuttle and Tuttle, 2012). In other words, formative feedback quickly “fixes” behaviors. The aim of this project was to understand student’s perceptions after receiving formative feedback. Students responded to a questionnaire that asked them to evaluate the feedback they had received and whether they could use the feedback in future activities. While over 90% of the students stated that formative feedback was helpful, less than 60% of the students reported that it was the most helpful activity
Formative Assessment: What Do Teachers Need to Know and Do?
Photo: Liquid Library F ORMATIVE assessment, if used effectively, can provide teachers and their students with the information they need to move learning forward. But after more than a hundred years of exhortations and a significant body of research on the topic, the idea that assessment and teaching are reciprocal activities is still not firmly situated in the practice of educators. Instead, assessment is often viewed as something in competition with teaching, rather than as an integral part of teaching and learning. In our current accountability environment, assessment is not regarded as a source of information that can be used during instruction. Instead, it has become a tool solely for summarizing what students have learned and for ranking students and schools. In the process, the reciprocal relationship between teaching and assessment has been lost from sight. In a context in which assessment is overwhelmingly identified with the competitive evaluation of schools, teachers, and students, it is scarcely surprising that classroom teachers identify assessment as something external to their everyday practice. Educators recognize that annual state tests provide too little information that arrives too late for planning instruction, and this has prompted districts and schools to supplement state assessments with interim or benchmark assessments. These typically consist of item banks, administration tools, and customized reports, and they usually are administered uniformly to all students three to four times a year. Their greater frequency notwithstanding, these assessments still do not provide teachers with information they can use for ongoing instruction. Despite the enthusiasm for these assessments at the district level and the considerable resources that are being expended on them, the fact remains that they cover too long a period of instruction and provide too little detail for effective use in ongoing instructional planning. At best, they function more as snapshots of student progress and as predictors of student performance on the end-of-year, statewide tests. Indeed, Dylan Wiliam and Marnie Thompson suggest that they might better be described as “early warning summative” tools rather than as tools that can be formative to instruction. Furthermore, teachers do not control how or when these tests occur, what the purpose of the assessment is, or who Formative Assessment: What Do Teachers Need to Know and Do?
Uptake as language awareness
Allwright (1984b) has suggested that asking learners to report the items they have learnt from a lesson (uptake) provides a means of investigating the relationship between classroom interaction and language learning. The study reported in this paper constitutes an investigation of uptake. It examines the sincerity and validity of uptake as a measure of language learning by comparing the words learners report learning after completing a listening task with the words they score correctly on a translation test. The results suggest that whereas uptake may constitute a fairly sincere measure of learning and may have construct validity, its concurrent validity is uncertain. It is suggested, however, that uptake constitutes a useful measure of explicit vocabulary learning (i.e. of items learners are aware of having learned). Such a measure is of interest to both researchers and teachers. However, further research is required to establish what kind of lexical knowledge it measures.