Classroom assessment and self-regulated learning

Introduction

I just read two articles on classroom assessment and self-regulated learning. Be sure to read the reports, you will find the links in this post.  I am including some info from both studies. Starting off with “Bridging classroom assessment and self-regulated learning” by Christian Brandmo , Ernesto Panadero & Therese N. Hopfenbeck, and I would like to share some of their findings here. Source: Routledge. 

Over the past few decades, educational research has made considerable progress in describing activities that promote more effective student learning. Two fields of research that have made significant contributions to this progress have been self-regulated learning (SRL) (Panadero, 2017; Schunk & Greene, 2018a) and educational assessment (Brown, 2018; Wiliam, 2017), more specifically formative assessment (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Wiliam, 2011).

Formative assessment and assessment for learning

While there remains much more work to be done to integrate research on assessment for learning with more fundamental research on instructional design, feedback, self-regulated learning, and motivation, there is now a strong body of theoretical and empirical work that suggests that integrating assessment with instruction may well have unprecedented power to increase student engagement and to improve learning outcome. (Wiliam, 2011: 13)

Self-regulated learning

Self-regulated learning (SRL) can be described as the process where the learner activates and sustains their cognition, motivation, behaviours and feelings towards the attainment of a learning goal (Schunk & Green, 2018b). In other words, SRL is about students approaching academic tasks in a planned way, while adapting their learning activities/ performance to the context and task in order to achieve progress towards the learning goal. Moreover, SRL interventions have shown to have a positive effect on students’ achievement (Dignath et al., 2008; Jansen et al., 2019).

An Enhanced Formative Assessment and Self–Regulated Learning Program: From the Classroom to the Workplace

Jay Finkelman¹*, John Hudesman², Bert Flugman² and Sara Crosby³

SRL teaches students and workers to become more efficient and effective learners through a three stage cyclical process. The first planning stage teaches the learner how to set goals, select appropriate strategies, and make efficacy judgments. The second practice stage teaches them how to monitor their progress in real time. And the third evaluation stage allows learners to measure how close they came to achieving their goal, and more importantly, sets the stage for the next SRL cycle so that they can make additional progress.

In order to optimize the usefulness of formative assessments, researchers have concluded that certain “built ins” must be included. For example, the best outcomes are usually obtained when feedback includes specific suggestions about what the recipients can do to improve their skills [1]. By contrast, feedback that focuses on praise or punishment is far less effective. Additionally, it is necessary that the recipient of the feedback must actively participate in the formative assessment process, [2–4]. In other words, when students or supervisees receive feedback, together with specific suggestions for follow up, there must be an explicit requirement that they engage in activities that demonstrate that they are actually using the feedback to improve their performance.

Researchers also emphasized that teachers and supervisors must also make adjustments to their teaching or supervision in response to the assessment evidence. In other words, they are also expected to make changes to their teaching and management styles on the basis of the new information generated by the assessment. When a feedback system contains these components, there is ample evidence that students and workers improve their performance. For example, across a range of content domains students’ achievement gains generated with formative assessment were among the largest ever reported for education interventions [3,4,6]. Underscoring the importance of formative assessment and feedback in the learning process, a review of 196 formative assessment⁄feedback studies found that when properly implemented this approach resulted in a positive mean effect size of 0.79 an effect size greater than students’ prior cognitive ability, socioeconomic background, and class size [1].

Phases

1. The planning phase
2. The practice phase
3. The evaluation phase

The assessment should include both academic content as well as metacognitive components. First, students are asked to look over the quiz, and, before starting to answer the questions, they are asked to predict their quiz grade. This parallels the self–evaluation portion on many workplace assessments. Next, students are asked to read each quiz question, but before answering it, they are asked to make a self–efficacy judgment about how confident they are that they will correctly answer the question. After attempting to solve the problem, students are also required to make an additional self–evaluation judgment indicating how confident they are that they correctly solved the problem. The importance of these judgments is reflected in the finding that students who were more accurate in their self–efficacy and self–evaluation judgments also did better on a variety of academic outcome measures than students who were overly optimistic in their confidence judgments

In educational settings, teachers are expected to score the EFAPSRL assessments and then return them to their students together with specific comments and the requirement that they act on this feedback. This turn around must be done in a timely fashion since the usefulness of most feedback degrades quickly. For example, how helpful is it for students to get feedback on how to do multiplication and division if they don’t get this information until after the teacher starts discussing a more advanced topic such as the division of fractions, which relies on knowledge of multiplication and division? Under these circumstance the feedback is “too little too late.”

In an educational setting, when quizzes are returned to students, they also receive a Self–Reflection Form for each incorrectly answered question. For example, in the case of a mathematics class, this form might include several major sections. In the first section, students are asked to explain any discrepancies between their SRL judgments and their score on the quiz question. As mentioned, this discrepancy focuses on whether students overestimate, underestimate, or are on target in their perception of their predictive abilities and confidence judgments relative to their actual performance (grade) on the question

Teachers and supervisors must use the information from the self–reflection forms to inform additional changes in their instruction or supervision.

It is important for the recipient of the feedback to view the return of any assessment as the starting point for additional learning rather than as a mark of failure.