Are they taking action? Accounting undergraduates’ engagement with assessment criteria and self-regulation development

ABSTRACT

Our study aims to investigate whether engaging students with formative assessment and feedback activities could support students’ self-regulation, improve performance and improve satisfaction with assessment. The intervention designs are implemented using a novel framework, developed for staff reflection, derived from a self-regulation learning model and formative assessment and feedback principles.

Zimmerman’s self-regulation model is chosen for a holistic approach, covering all Phases, to investigate the interventions within 3 honours level modules covering 483 students and 9 academic staff. Student views are obtained immediately following interventions from a short questionnaire and statistically analysed; semi-structured staff interviews are analysed thematically from NVivo.

Significant improvement in students’ confidence and satisfaction with assessments occurs; evidence for improvement in performance and self-regulation is limited. Staff reflection areas are identified with suggestions for more effective feedforward strategies in support of self-regulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-regulation
• engagement
• formative assessment
• assessment criteria
• accounting education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Funding was provided by the University of Huddersfield’s Teaching and Learning Institute and the Business School; funding £32,760 for the whole School project, of which Accounting was approximately one-third of the modules in the project.