Connecting through collaborative assessment practice: using student exemplars, rubrics and guided feedback to promote student learning in post-primary education.
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of supporting students to become independent, self-directed learners with the capacity to collaborate with peers in both online and in-person classroom settings. Significant disruption to traditional methods of organising and evaluating learning means that students have had to become more independent in evaluating their own trajectory of progress within the parameters of success in different subjects. Academic standards can be elusive to students so the use of exemplars to establish understanding of quality and success can be helpful for students. Exemplars can make success criteria more concrete and help to establish best practice across different subject areas through the use of rubrics and guided feedback to explore student exemplar material.
This paper is based on a PhD. study which explored how formative assessment is used in Irish post-primary school classrooms to support student learning and collaboration, foster students’ independence and metacognitive awareness and develop student understanding of the concepts of achievement and agency in education.
This was a qualitative multiple case-study comprising classroom observation of practice and interviews with students and teachers to explore the planning, enactment and experience of formative assessment in the classroom. Five different teachers and 127 students were involved in the study. A sociocultural lens was used to examine the interplay between identity, agency and community of practice in classroom formative assessment.
One of the main findings of the study was that students’ active role in collaborative formative assessment activities interacted with agency and identity to inform their experience of learning and enhance their understanding of achievement in different subject areas.
One of the most successful collaborative assessment activities was the use of exemplars of student practice and structured collaborative feedback. The use of exemplars has the potential to connect students with one another, either in person or in an online space, to build a shared understanding of good practice in different subject areas. It also provides a way to delve into the process of learning through the shared construction and implementation of rubrics and standards. It supports the process of peer and self-assessment by offering concrete material for student collaboration. A strong sense of classroom community can be achieved when the experience of working collaboratively to understand success criteria and provide and receive feedback from peers is both empowering and meaningful.