Editorial

Assessment informs teachers and learners as it helps outline the interactive relationships between different factors in students’ learning processes and provides feedback to facilitate subsequent learning (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). Based on Bandura’s social cognitive theory, Welk (1999) identified four determinants towards physical activity behaviour, namely enabling factors, predisposing factors, reinforcing factors and personal demographics, in shaping the answers of two vital questions for children: Is it worth it? and Am I able? The more positive the answers, the more likely children are to enjoy and engage in sports. Likewise, this approach can be applied to the analysis of students’ learning behaviour. Enabling factors are existing factors which facilitate the student’s later learning. For the English as a foreign language learner, the amount of lexical and grammatical knowledge is an example of an enabling factor that supports the person’s reading comprehension (Aryadoust & Baghaei, 2016). Predisposing factors include the learner’s espoused value, goal orientation, learning motivation, academic self-efficacy, expectancy and attributional beliefs. Reinforcing factors are encouragement and support from significant others in context, including teachers, peers and parents, and leadership from the school principal. Assessment in various forms is necessary to understand the dynamics of these four determinants and to generate feedback in support of further learning. However, in order to realise the full potential of assessment for learning (Assessment Reform Group, 1999), research found that teacher professional development; students’ knowledge, skills, attitudes, values and engagement with the feedback process; assessment design; and school contexts, including leadership and culture are all necessary for effective implementation (Heitink, Van der Kleij, Veldkamp, Schildkamp, & Kippers, 2016). The 10 articles of the current issue, all of which concern educational assessment with the intention of strengthening the positive effects brought about by some determinants, help inspire educators to encourage students to think that learning is worthwhile, and to believe that I can learn competently.

Assessment needs effective tools. An alternative form of the Defence Mechanism Inventory designed by Zhang (2016), the validated structure of test anxiety predictors based on control-value theory proposed by Ringeisen, Raufelder, Schnell, and Rohrmann (2016) and the International Baccalaureate Learner Profile questionnaire developed and validated by Walker, Lee, and Bryant (2016) are readily available for assessing the psychology and factors affecting learning. With a strong emphasis on the practical and empirical side, other authors contributed by researching the enabling, predisposing and demographic factors of learning.

Skills is a major enabling factor in learning. By comparing the assessment results done by computer-based Coh-Metrix and human raters on a group of ESL university students, the development of students’ paragraph writing skills was found to be related to the linguistic features of their written texts (Aryadoust, 2016). An assessment of accounting students found that both learners’ ability and the complexity of the learning material should be taken into account when carrying out segmentation or element isolation to reduce the complexity of problem-solving tasks to assist students (Blayney, Kalyuga, & Sweller, 2016). In a study administered with some upper-secondary test-takers in Sweden (Stenlund, Sundström, & Jonsson, 2016), practice testing with short-answer items was shown to be more beneficial to students’ learning and long-term memory. These three studies imply that assessment design as well as students’ academic skills can be enhanced to consolidate the enabling factors.

Predisposing factors, such as self-perceptions of ability, increase students’ likelihood of engaging in learning. Some articles in this issue focus on how test anxiety and coping affect students’ academic performance and academic achievement, with demographic factors exerting some influence on the predisposing factors. An investigation in Turkey on the test anxiety of students sitting for university entrance examinations suggested that test anxiety can be potentially predicted by dismissing, fearful and secure attachment styles and self-efficacy, and that test anxiety is influenced by gender (Erzen & Odacı, 2016). On the other hand, considering that higher test anxiety predicts lower academic performance, research findings showed that providing in-school training on task-focus and strategies to withstand academic pressures may help to relieve the influence of performance-interfering worries, and potentially enhance performance among examination-anxious students (Putwain, Daly, Chamberlain, & Sadreddini, 2016). Also related to grade prediction, it was recognised that a number of demographic, cognitive and psychosocial factors was associated with the grade point average of Northern Norwegian undergraduates, and study-track choice, task-solving skills, gender, lack of educational plans and literacy problems are grade predictors (Sæle et al., 2016). A study on Swedish primary students about future grades showed the effect of grading on the students’ achievement measured by grades one year later. It was found that graded students with low cognitive ability receive lower subsequent grades, and gender interacts with grading and with cognitive ability (Klapp, Cliffordson, & Gustafsson, 2016).

The 10 studies on assessment in Educational Psychology showcase how educators can provide feedback to drive students to become more motivated and confident in answering Is it worth it? and Am I able? along their learning path. This collection pays close attention to students’ academic skills and attainment, test anxiety and personal background factors of gender and psychosocial properties. These scholarly works update education professionals on the ever-changing determinants in learning behaviour. For assessment to work better in the twenty-first century, it is crucial to utilise information technology in assessment for, of and as learning (Siddiq, Hatlevik, Olsen, Throndsen, & Scherer, 2016). Genlott and Grönlund’s (2016) application of information and communication technologies to improve the literacy and mathematics learning of boys and girls, respectively, is one of the references for exploration in this direction, and relevant developments in assessment would be meaningful for future investigations into the multi-faceted and dynamic mechanisms of the personal, behavioural and environmental factors affecting learning.

Magdalena Mo Ching Mok