Who is feedback for?

The articles in this regular issue look at different forms of assessment practices such as grading and feedback and how stakeholders interact with the outcomes of these practices.

The first article presents a research study from Sweden on holistic and analytic grading. As grades are the main criteria for selecting schools for higher education, and they are based upon teachers’ judgement, grading is rather high stakes for students in Sweden. Johnson et al. (this issue) set up an experimental study where Swedish teachers were randomly assigned to two different conditions (i.e. analytic or holistic grading), in either English as a foreign language (EFL) or mathematics. The research study was conducted online, with only grades and written justification from the teachers collected by the research team. In the analytic condition, teachers received authentic student responses from four students four times, and were asked to grade these through an Internet-based form. At the end of the semester, teachers were asked to provide an overall grade. In the holistic condition, teachers received all material at one time, and would therefore not be influenced by previous experiences. Findings indicate that analytic grading was preferable to holistic grading in terms of agreement among teachers, with stronger effects found in EFL. Teachers in the analytic conditions made more references to grade levels without specifying criteria, while teachers in the holistic conditions provided more references to criteria in their justifications. Although the participants volunteered for the experiment and it was relatively small, the study offers important empirical results in an area where there are still more questions than solutions. The authors propose further investigations into how to increase agreement between teachers’ grading, including using moderation procedures where teachers could review each other’s grading.

In the second article, Yan et al. (this issue) present a systematic review on factors influencing teacher’s intentions and implementations regarding formative assessment. The 52 studies included in the qualitative synthesis discuss issues such as how teachers’ self-efficacy and education and training, influence their intention to conduct formative assessment, and add to previous reviews on implementation of formative assessment. More specifically, it demonstrates how not only contextual but also personal factors need to be taken into consideration when designing school-based support measures or teacher professional development programmes with the aim to promote formative assessment practices.

In the article Who is feedback for? The influence of accountability and quality assurance agendas on the enactment of feedback processes, Winstone & Carless (this issue) explore the consequences of the evaluation and accountability measures in higher education in UK, and how it influences and interacts with feedback processes from teachers to students. The study is of importance, as we have less knowledge of the unintended consequences of the current accountability system, which at the best can improve students’ learning and increase teaching quality, but at the worse, can undermine teachers’ ability to take risk and innovate their teaching because of their fear of failing and scoring low on student evaluations such as the National Student Survey (NSS). Indeed, one of the findings from the teacher interviews suggested teachers focused more upon making students happy than their learning. The reason was the expectations from the department, where participants perceived the need for good scores on student evaluations as more important than the learning itself.

The article discusses important issues such as students’ voices in a climate where the UK system with growing student fees has tensions around students as ‘consumers’ or ‘customers’. It demonstrates how teachers’ fear of negative student feedback can result in less innovative teaching and defensive teaching approaches. The authors call for leaders who can challenge these mechanisms and reinstate the primary purpose of the feedback, to enhance students’ learning. Although the data is collected in the UK, the dilemmas will be recognised globally, and should be discussed in relation to the ongoing evaluation of universities.

The changing teaching and learning environment following the pandemic has made the article by Blundell (this issue) particularly relevant, as it is a scoping review of teachers’ use of digital technologies in school-based assessment. More specifically, Blundell has reviewed published research from 2009 to 2019 investigating how teachers are using digital technologies in both teacher-centred and student-centred pedagogies. A variety of practices were documented, from traditional use of automated marking, to different ways of providing immediate feedback to students and teachers, as part of more formative assessment practices, e.g., with ePortfolios, use of game-based and virtual/augmented environments, and video-recordings to support feedback for performance-based activities. Following the pandemic, teachers and researchers have made huge steps forward with respect to teaching, learning and assessing students online. Blundell concludes that emerging and future digital technologies could represent new opportunities to improve on and diversify school-based assessment.

Rasooli et al. (this issue) present a study investigating 60 secondary students with disabilities, their 45 teachers and 58 parents in four states in Australia. The authors discuss fairness and justice in assessment practices, and how adjustments appropriate to students’ needs should provide students with opportunities to demonstrate their learning through assessment at an optimal level. Using open-ended survey responses, the researchers were able to provide a more granular-level explanation of the assessment processes students had experienced. Moreover, the article sheds light upon a group of students that we continue to lack empirical research studies on globally. It would be worth replicating this study in other countries.

The final article in this issue is a country profile from Georgia, by Gorgodze & Chakhaia outlining how the country of 3.7 million has built up their education system after the break-up of the Soviet Union. The authors explain how global trends such as high stakes testing have had a profound impact in Georgia. They describe how the introduction of Unified National Examinations was part of the anti-corruption reforms in Georgia, as the country suffered from a lack of trust in a system where students and their families engaged in bribery with members of the examination committee, nepotism and cronyism. The authors give an account of the challenges a country faces when trying to implement better assessment systems and reforms within corrupt systems. The article is an important read in times when we unfortunately continue to see democratic education systems threatened.

Change in the editorial board

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Anastasiya Lipnevich as one of our new Executive Editors on the Editorial Board. She is a Professor of Educational Psychology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Dr. Lipnevich, originally from Belarus, received her PhD from the Graduate School of Education, Rutgers University. Before taking up her position in New York, Dr. Lipnevich worked as a postdoctoral research scholar at Educational Testing Service in Princeton. Dr. Lipnevich has held visiting professorships, among others, at the University of Konstanz, Germany, University of Otago, New Zealand and National Institute of Education, Singapore. She co-authored the Cambridge Handbook of Instructional Feedback (Lipnevich & Smith, 2018) and has recently published on grading and assessment in this journal (Lipnevich et al., 2020).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.