The uneasy alliance of assessment and feedback
نویسنده
چکیده
Assessment and feedback can make strange bedfellows. Their goals sometimes lie at cross purposes. Summative assessment, for example, is judgmental, telling us whether or not learners have reached a necessary standard; as Konopasek observes, “when practicing summative assessment, we are acting far more as regulators than educators” [1]. Feedback, on the other hand, is developmental, facilitating learners’ progress. Reconciling judgement and development is a tenuous balancing act. Published criteria for good assessment suggest that learners should participate in receiving and acting on feedback as part of assessment processes, particularly when the intent of those processes is formative [2]. Feedback is critical to what Norcini calls the ‘catalytic effect’ of formative assessment – its capacity to drive learning forward [2]. And even summative assessment assessments contain a treasure trove of information about learners – information that could be harnessed to guide their future learning. Exactly how we can encourage learners to meaningfully engage with the feedback embedded in these assessments is a vexing challenge for educators. Harrison and colleagues grapple with this problem in their exploration of students’ receptivity to formative feedback across three different medical schools, in three different countries, with three distinct approaches to assessment [3]. Their refreshing approach considers the influence of institutional assessment culture on learner behaviour. Recent calls for medical schools to establish cultures that empha-
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