Feedback to writing, assessment for teaching and learning and student progress

Parr, J. M., & Timperley, H. S. (2010). Feedback to writing, assessment for teaching and learning and student progress. Assessing Writing, 15(2), 68-85.

Background

Providing feedback is an important component of assessment to improve student learning. Recent research on written feedback has focussed primarily on describing aspects of feedback and student inferences from, and attitudes to these responses. There is little work that considers the interactive and contextual nature of the responses that impacts learning.

Aims

The study investigated teachers’ ability to give quality formative feedback to students’ writing and its impact on students’ achievement. It located written feedback within a pedagogical and assessment for learning framework. The various dimensions of quality feedback were delineated as, first, knowing the success criteria for quality performance, second, ascertaining accurately the level of writing performance in relation to these criteria and, third, identifying the gaps between the current performance and the desired learning goal and helping students close these gaps in a systematic way.

Sample

Fifty-nine teachers and approximately 375 Grades 1 to 8 students, from six New Zealand schools, participated in this study.

Method

The quality of the teachers’ feedback was analysed from their feedback responses to a writing sample using a scoring rubric. The rubric covered seven dimensions of writing that included four deep characteristics: audience, structure, content and language resources, and three surface features (grammar, spelling and punctuation). Impact on students’ achievement was measured using a nationally standardised measure of writing.

Findings

The authors documented a significant correlation between the quality score for teacher feedback and the average magnitude of increase in writing scores for students in the second year of the study. That is, the more competent a teacher was in providing effective feedback to writing, the greater was the improvement in his or her students’ writing. The study also reported a significant gain in students’ raw writing score over two years.

Implications

The strong relationship between the teachers’ ability to provide quality assessment for learning feedback and improvement in student learning indicates the need to enhance teacher content knowledge of how the written language works, as well as assessment knowledge and pedagogical instruction. To improve teachers’ assessment knowledge, the authors suggest that they examine and moderate students’ samples with colleagues to establish shared understanding of what quality writing performance is.

Original article retrieved from Google scholar.