The primary purpose of assessment and evaluation is to improve student learning. This is the first sentence in the fundamental principles section of the Growing Success document. In this section, the Ministry of Education lists seven fundamental principles to support teachers with ensuring that assessment, evaluation, and reporting are valid, reliable, and lead to the improvement of learning for all students. Included in this list is providing ongoing descriptive feedback to support student learning.
In 2010 when the Ministry released Growing Success, I was in my first-year teaching. At that time, I was in a long-term occasional teaching assignment. I was hired as a Grade 7 rotary teacher assigned to teach Language and Social Studies to two classes. I was ecstatic because I received the opportunity to work with students at the age and grade that most interested me and teaching my favorite subject areas. Reading the Growing Success document that year, I strove to incorporate the seven fundamental principles in my assessment and evaluation practices. Particularly the principle on feedback because I believed and continue to believe that if I provide descriptive feedback to each student, it has the potential to improve their academic achievement.
One incident that continues to resonate with me is the feedback I received from a student. I remember spending hours reading student work then writing copious amounts of comments. I would sometimes write one to two pages worth of constructive and descriptive feedback to guide students in ways that I believed would lead them to improve the quality of their work along with a grade. I recall returning one written assignment to a student at the end of the instructional day where I watched her look at the grade, then crumple her paper into a ball and throw it into the recycling bin as she exited the classroom. I was shocked. Yet more than shocked I was disappointed in myself. I knew that I had made an error, but with a lack of teaching experience I had yet to identify what that error was.
Two years later, again teaching grade 7, this time in in a core model as a permanent teacher, I gained some insight to the experience with the student while attending a school staff meeting. A centrally assigned instructional resource teacher facilitated a session on assessment and evaluation. She shared that if teachers attach a grade to student work, they should include limited feedback. She went on to say that students think that the grade signals that they are at the end of a learning cycle so there is no opportunity for them to action the feedback to improve the quality of their work because they’ve already been evaluated. However, the facilitator also said, include enough, but not too much specific descriptive feedback to help students improve the quality of their work if students are in the assessment stage of their learning. She went on further to say that if students have ample time and opportunities to apply feedback to their work prior to being evaluated it has the potential to lead to improved student achievement.
These comments made sense and provided some clarity in relation to why the student ignored my comments when she saw the grade on her paper. The facilitators comments also helped me to understand that I provided far too much feedback to the student at the time of evaluation that may have been overwhelming and disheartening. Following this staff meeting, I began revising my assessment and evaluation practices but still I felt I had more to learn about feedback to support student learning.
Years later I read the book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students by Zaretta Hammond. In the book Hammond writes, “Contrary to what we may think, simply giving feedback doesn’t initiate change. It has to be accepted as valid and actionable by the learner. He then has to commit to using that information to do something different” (p. 102).
This quote helped me to understand that I need to teach students how to read my feedback then show them how to use my suggestions, if they believe them to be useful, to improve the quality of their work.
The meaning that I’ve now been able to deduce from the experience with the student in my first-year teaching coupled with my ongoing learning about assessment and evaluation practices is that I provided too much feedback at the time of evaluation where she had no time to use the information to improve her work. I also failed to teach her how to use my feedback to improve the quality of their work. I further understand that feedback between students and teachers is a reciprocal and iterative process. Students through direct and indirect ways provide information regarding how well I am supporting their learning while I provide direct feedback for how well they are progressing at developing the knowledge, skills, and competencies outlined in Ministry curriculums.
When I work with teachers, I share these insights by encouraging them to think about the ways they use feedback from students to re-think the feedback they give to students to support their learning. I also ask teachers to consider embracing the idea that as we gain more practical experience assessing and evaluating student work combined with our growing knowledge and understanding of diverse student learning needs and revised curriculum documents, our feedback practices should adjust and evolve in ways that better support their learning.
