Formative assessment as practice: the role of students’ motivation

Abstract

Formative assessment can be seen as an integral part of teaching and learning, as formative assessment affects students' learning and vice versa. Students' motivation can theoretically be placed at the centre of this reciprocal relationship, as formative assessment is assumed to affect students' need satisfaction of autonomy, competence and relatedness, and consequently their autonomous motivation. In the current study, two assumptions were tested empirically: formative assessment contributes to students' autonomous motivation and students' need satisfaction functions as a mediator in this relationship. The results provided support for those assumptions and indicated that more perceived use of formative assessment is associated with more feelings of autonomy and competence, and more autonomous motivation. The current study demonstrated the benefits of studying formative assessment as practice and provides encouragement for teachers to start applying formative assessment in their classroom. The theoretical model provides teachers with guidelines for an optimal implementation of formative assessment and provides researchers with a framework to study the phenomenon of 'formative assessment as practice' in more depth.

Formative E-Assessment in PAD College English Class

“…In the measurement tradition, formative assessment is often explained as a contrast to summative assessment. Formative assessment is about low-stakes testing, whereas summative assessment concerns highstakes testing [2]. However, assessments with a summative or a formative purpose are both used to produce inferences about students' learning.…”

“…In other words, when assessment is looked as a formative practice, teachers and the students have their roles realized in the process of learning. In practice, formative assessment is seen as a cyclical program of high and low-stake tasks in which students are actively involved both as assessee and/or assessor [2].…”

Conceptual Analysis of Influential Factors in the Motivation and Involvement of the University Student towards the Assessment in Physical Education

“…The formative and shared assessment processes seek to make the students aware and responsible for their achievements, relate them to the competences to be developed and enable them to make autonomous and contextualized progress in their learning [65,[69][70][71][72][73][74]. This leads us to obtain results as positive as those indicated by Leenknecht, Wijnia, Köhlen, Fryer, Rikers and Loyens [75], who have demonstrated that the practice of a formative assessment with students generates in them a feeling of competence and autonomous motivation, or other studies [76][77][78], which corroborated the importance of formative assessment for increasing student involvement and responsibility. In this sense, we can find transferable practical experiences of formative and shared assessment, capable of generating motivation and responsibility in students through the development of their autonomy, such as the one presented by Pérez-Pueyo, Hortigüela-Alcalá and Hernando-Garijo [79].…”

Using scaffolding strategies to improve formative assessment practice in higher education

“…Formative assessment has become a well-known and important concept in education and research (Black and Wiliam 2018;Schildkamp et al 2020). Formative assessment is defined as a process of constant interaction between students and teacher (Black and Wiliam 2012), and should be viewed as an integral part of teaching and learning (Leenknecht et al 2021). However, formative assessment approaches are not regularly adopted in classroom practice (Robinson et al 2014;Boud et al 2018).…”