Abstract
The ability to assess learning outcomes is vital to effective teaching. Without understanding what students have learned, it is impossible to tailor information, tasks or feedback adequately to their individual needs. Thus, assessment literacy has been increasingly recognized as a core teacher competency in educational research, with many empirical studies investigating teachers’ abilities, knowledge and subjective views in relation to classroom assessment. In contrast, relatively few studies have focused on students’ perspectives of assessment. This is surprising, since gathering students’ feedback on their teachers’ assessment practices seems a logical step toward improving those practices. To help fill this gap, we present an explorative study using the recently developed Fairness Barometer as a tool to help identify specific strengths and weaknesses in individual teachers’ assessment methods. Viewing assessment through the lens of classroom justice theory, the Fairness Barometer asks students and teachers to rate aspects of procedural and informational justice in their own (teachers’) assessment practices. We examined the resulting fairness discrepancy profiles for 10 Austrian secondary school classes (177 students). Results showed wide variation in profile pattern, evidence that both students and teachers can differentiate between different aspects of assessment fairness. Further exploration of the resulting discrepancy-profiles revealed certain problem types with some teachers differing from their students’ perception in almost every rated aspect, some showing specific assessment-related behaviors that require improvement (e.g. explaining grading criteria of oral exams), and others demonstrating almost identical responses as their students to the addressed fairness aspects. Results clearly indicate the potential of the Fairness Barometer to be used for teacher training and teacher self-development within the domain of teacher assessment literacy.
Highlights
One of the core tasks of teachers is assessing their students’ competencies (Ainscow et al, 2013)
Can such a shift in perspective deliver new insights into teachers’ assessment practices or provide novel tools for professional development? The present study examines the potential of the Fairness Barometer (Sonnleitner and Kovacs, 2018), a self-administered questionnaire grounded in classroom justice theory (Duplaga and Astani, 2010), to reveal discrepancies between students’ and their teachers’ perception of assessment practices
Descriptive statistics of students’ responses to the Fairness Barometer, presented in Table 1, clearly indicate a ceiling effect for almost every item, with item means between 7.23 and 9.05 (“Exams only test material that has been taught in class”) and medians ranging between 8 and 10
Summary
One of the core tasks of teachers is assessing their students’ competencies (Ainscow et al, 2013). Despite the importance of assessment in teaching, teachers themselves report being insufficiently prepared for this task through teacher education programs and mostly learning “on the job” how to best assess their students (Volante and Fazio, 2007; Battistone et al, 2019) This uncertainty seems warranted, given numerous studies that experimentally show flaws in teachers’ diagnostic competencies (e.g., Kaiser et al, 2017; Tobisch and Dresel, 2017) or that identify a substantial lack of teacher assessment literacy (for an excellent review of the last three decades, see Xu and Brown, 2016). Beyond the relevance of this information for large-scale research, uncovering such differences might provoke “cognitive conflict” (Cobb et al, 1990) that requires teachers to reflect upon their actions and improve aspects of their assessment literacy
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