In this study, I explored students’ approaches to peer assessment and feedback.
In Study 1, an inductive examination revealed that the productivity of a single peer assessment is contingent on students’ feedback literacy, particularly their ability to judge their peers’ work, produce constructive criticism, and understand and appreciate formative assessment. An investigation into the features of feedback literacy in Study 2 showed that seventh graders are already able to develop feedback literacy. Feedback literacy’s value has been recognized in universities (O’Donovan, 2017) and workplaces (Carless & Boud, 2018). While most people will not attend higher education, feedback literacy skills are relevant to everyone, and students’ feedback literacy should be fostered and further researched in secondary education.
Even more importantly, this study was the first to identify and describe criteria for students’ feedback literacy. Prior studies on the development of feedback literacy did not use explicit criteria but described changes in individual students’ skills and attitudes (Han & Xu, 2019b; Hey-Cunningham et al., 2020).
With criteria, the features of feedback literacy become concrete and applicable to researchers, students, and teachers. For researchers, the criteria enable an understanding of the phases of development and allow for tracking and comparing the development across disciplines and school sectors. The criteria are also useful for students’ self-reflection and self-assessment because they make students aware of their own attitudes and skills, and they communicate how students could proceed (Andrade & Du, 2007). Teachers could show the criteria
6 DISCUSSION
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to students and discuss them before delivering feedback. With the criteria, they could point out, for example, that embracing criticism is difficult but desirable or that merely reading feedback is not the most effective way of using it. For educators, the criteria offer an understanding of the range of students’ skills and thus assist in organizing peer assessment training, identifying students’ strengths and needs, and adjusting support.
The findings of Study 2 showed that students are not necessarily inclined to read feedback or use it for improvement. According to Study 1, students who are not interested in a task ignore even useful feedback about it. As the purpose of feedback is to help students reduce the gap between their current and desired understandings (Hattie & Timperley, 2007), feedback has little effect if students have no goals or are not interested in pursuing them. In such cases, there is no point in pushing feedback; rather, teachers could help students to find a goal that is worth pursuing. Likewise, critical or guiding feedback cannot help students achieve their goals if they consider it offensive. Teachers could help students with this issue by communicating the message that critical feedback is a natural part of learning and does not signify failure. Distinguishing the different purposes of formative and summative feedback would be helpful for students. As noted in Study 3, some students focused on their marks during peer assessment even when marks were not given. This tendency is probably the result of the prevalently summative assessment practices in Finland (Atjonen et al., 2019).
Although the idea of formative assessment was introduced to students with peer assessment, they were unaccustomed to it, and apparently, they could not digest it immediately.
The results showed that students are rather passive in the feedback process.
In this study, even when they were interested in feedback, most students did not invest in interpreting it; instead, the students expected that feedback would tell them unambiguously how to proceed. This mindset likely comes from students being accustomed to receiving teacher feedback, which is not generally questioned or rejected (O’Donovan, 2017). Assessment has traditionally been the purview of teachers (Boud, 2014), with students as the objects of assessment (Boud & Falchikov, 2006). If students are not accustomed to judging the feedback they receive, they should be encouraged to do so. Teachers could discuss different ways of reacting to feedback, such as interpreting its meaning, using it immediately, writing it down for the future, or rejecting it. If students are guided to choose whether and how to act on feedback, they may begin to see critical feedback as a gift that can advance learning instead of a burden that always signifies more work.
It is unclear to what extent the use of peer assessment affects the development of students’ feedback literacy. However, peer assessment offers opportunities to have discussions about the features of feedback literacy, which is one potential reason for the development of students’ feedback literacy. When comparing this and other studies on the development of feedback literacy (Han and Xu, 2019b; Hey-Cunningham et al., 2020), the common elements are explicit discussions about feedback processes and the use of peer feedback. Hence, this
57 study supports earlier findings about the training for and implementation of peer assessment as a tool to promote the development of students’ feedback literacy.
Contextual elements influence students’ feedback literacy (Chong, 2020), particularly assessment culture. Peer assessment and students’ feedback literacy are not practiced or developed in a vacuum, but schools’ other assessment practices mold students’ understanding of assessment and feedback. In Finland, many elements of assessment maintain students’ passive role. On average, students are more aware of summative than formative assessment and teachers’
feedback comes most often in the forms of grades or points (Atjonen et al., 2019).
Commonly used technology-enhanced feedback is important to students, but it mainly takes the form of teachers’ one-directional messaging, and it guides students to focus on a superficial level of behavior (Oinas, 2020). Even student–
teacher–parent discussions, which are aimed to be participative, often turn out to be teacher-centered provision of information and neglect students’ active participation (Luukkonen, 2020). It is contradictory if students are given full responsibility to assess other students’ work in one situation but not expected to comment even on their own assessment in another. Therefore, it would be useful not just to add participative assessment elements but also to examine all the pieces together. Better alignment between schools’ feedback practices would support the development of students’ feedback literacy.
Teacher-centered summative assessment puts students in a passive role and may therefore hinder the development of their feedback literacy. When both formative and summative practices are used simultaneously, summatively assessed tasks tend to attract students’ attention (Silseth & Gilje, 2019). Formative assessment’s potential of disrupting the traditional teacher-centered learning culture has been questioned (Nieminen, 2020), which is relevant to this study because though peer assessment was used formatively, the students received summative grades at the end of the learning modules. In self-assessment, the contradictions between formative and summative practices can be tackled using summative self-assessment—that is, letting students decide their own grades (Nieminen & Tuohilampi, 2020). However, with peer assessment, formative practices seem to provide a deeper orientation to learning than summative practices, as the latter focuses on grades instead of learning (Panadero, 2016). The results of this thesis show that formativity does not distort peer assessment or hinder the development of students’ feedback literacy. The alignment of formative peer assessment with summative assessment―for example, by letting students improve their work after peer assessment but before the teacher summatively evaluates it―may even accentuate the focus on learning and development of students’ work. This is not to say that this study’s assessment practices and its balance of formative and summative assessment were optimal.
An interesting topic for future research would be a comparison of peer assessment interventions and the development of students’ feedback literacy in different assessment cultures.
Peer assessment is a concrete way of sharing the responsibility for learning and assessment with students and molding the culture of the classroom into
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something more participatory and student centered. Even though peer assessment might appear awkward or technical at the outset, it can gradually lead students toward relational agency (i.e., the ability to seek and use others’
help and support others in mutual attempts to learn; Edwards & D’Arcy, 2004).