Does Formative Assessment Help? Students’ Perspective On ‘Feedback’ From Pakistan

Abstract

For long researchers have been making a case in favor of formative assessment or ‘assessment for learning’ (Williams 2009) against summative assessment or ‘assessment of learning’ (Isabwe, 2012). In our earlier work (Qureshi, Zahoor and Zahoor, 2017)) where we compared to be teachers-students’ results using formative and summative assessment techniques, the empirical evidence favored summative assessment. The present paper is an extension of that work. In our current work, we followed Haroldson’s (2012) approach and focused on students’ opinions of the written ‘feedback’ in order to explore their perspective on formative assessment. Like Limniou Smith, (2014), we also believe that formative assessment is a process whereby students “reflect on their own learning and understand what has been developed, omitted or improved” (p. 210), therefore, their perspective may be helpful in evaluating the utility of feedback practice for learning. Through purposeful sampling we selected a sample of high scorers, i.e., with Median score = 22 and above as per summative assessment, from our earlier research study. This yielded a number of 32 students. Their views were sought trough semi structured questionnaire and a series of focus group discussions The emerging themes included ‘invisibility’ of efforts, intensive engagement with academic reading, and longer harvesting time for the ‘benefits’ of formative feedback. These views of the current student-teachers have implications for the future processes of teaching and learning at the institutions of higher learning as they will be shaping the academic experiences of our future generation of academicians.