Can Digital Technology Improve The Quality of Formative Assessment and Feedback?

BY PENNY QUINTERO HUNT (OSFC)

Brief background

Students need to act on feedback from formative assessments in order to improve their learning. This is for both content knowledge and to develop their application, analysis and evaluation skills. Providing sufficient feedback in the form of individual written comments can take a very long time to write for each assignment marked, and with class sizes of 25+ students, this is a significant workload issue. Using whole class feedback can be effective in reducing workload but once feedback is given to the class, it is lost. Limited class time means that time cannot always be given over to reworking a response immediately and so the feedback is not in the working memory when improvements are attempted at home.

The aim of the project

Initially the aim of the project was to develop ways of using digital technology to supplement whole class feedback, which tends to be oral, instead of providing individual written feedback comments to students on their work.

Existing evidence

Evidence for the effectiveness of feedback is that it has a high impact for very low cost based on moderate evidence, with 8 months additional progress (EEF Toolkit). Technology has the potential to improve assessment and feedback, increasing the accuracy of assessment, the speed with which assessment information is collected, with the potential to inform teachers’ decision-making and reduce workload. Technology can be used to provide feedback directly to pupils, but in all cases careful implementation and monitoring are necessary. Feedback via technology is likely to be most beneficial if it supplements, but is aligned to, other forms of feedback. (EEF: Using Digital Technology to Improve Learning - Guidance Report, 2019). Assessment with the use of digital technologies has been seen to provide immediate feedback, increased student engagement and can facilitate self-evaluative and self-regulated learning. It can offer 'real-time', learner-led feedback that diagnoses and reduces misconceptions quickly (Oldfield et al. 2012). Digital quizzes make it easier to space out repetition of new content to enable spaced practice retrieval both during and outside of lessons. By breaking down a complex skill and focusing on one part of it, it's possible to quickly identify problems and to fix them (Christodoulou, 2020). Using screen or voice recording technology, feedback could be recorded using digital technology – and this would take as long as marking and writing feedback for one [essay] (Picardo, 2017).

Inquiry implementation so far

I carried out an initial survey of Year 12 students in the two control groups and found that 72% of students prefer individual written feedback on assessments, 21% preferring individual verbal feedback and only 6% preferred verbal group feedback in class. However, at the same time, when asked what interested students most in the feedback, only 17% stated the feedback comments themselves as opposed to 77% who were more interested in the grade received. In addition, only 32% of students actually made improvements to the assessed work and only 15% of these doing this often while 17% never did. 30% of students stated that they used the feedback to set targets for themselves.

A baseline assessment was given to both groups to identify their different starting points. Following this, a total of six assessments have been undertaken by both groups, including short answer knowledge assessments, and longer essay-based questions. However, as lockdown took place, all students were completing work and assessments using the Teams digital platform. Therefore the focus has tended to be on whole-class feedback as opposed to individual written comments using available platforms in college (for both groups).

Feedback for the control group has been focused on individual written feedback comments on the assessments submitted and in the ‘feedback box’ on Teams. The intervention group has had a range of whole-class feedback including: ‘examiner report’ style feedback along with exemplar models of student work and the grades received with comments; Stream videos of feedback on answers which students can access remotely, in addition to the explanation given in class; MSForms MCQ assessment with immediate feedback on correct/ incorrect answers.

In addition, to monitor workload, the timing of marking, as well as the time taken to create whole-class feedback resources was undertaken for each assessment.

Preliminary findings

Preliminary findings are inconclusive with regards to student progress so far, with many negligible but two significant negative differences in attainment, albeit on shorter assessments. It is clear however, that the impact so far is not significantly positive. The average ALPS grade in the groups are 1/5 of one grade lower in the intervention group than the control group. In addition, the intervention group have had five students on targets for incomplete work and poor attitude to learning as opposed to only one in the control group, which means that this may have also impacted the progress of the group as a whole.

It was found that, once whole-class feedback has been given in lesson, students have rarely viewed the videos on Stream, despite being posted in their Teams channel. In addition, only one student has re-tried the MSForms MCQ quiz to better their score. Thus once feedback is given, students are not in the habit of going back to it. Perhaps this is more of an issue of metacognition, as opposed to the availability of feedback in digital forms.

In terms of workload, providing whole class feedback for the intervention group saved 1 hour and 15 minutes over six assessments for an average of 25 students per class. However, given that many of the errors and issues were similar, this would have been a saving of 5 hours and 20 minutes if applied over two classes with a total of 50 students. This is due to the economies of scale in terms of creation of the feedback resources versus the tie taken to write individual feedback comments for 50 students.

Given that teachers need to balance time/effort with outcomes/impact, I would need to continue this inquiry for a further period to determine if whole-class feedback is justifiable.