Although typically we think of peer assessment as assigning grades and peer feedback as having no grades, I ultimately find separating feedback and assessment unhelpful. There are plenty of assessments that happen in the real world with no numbers or grades, PhD vivas and job interviews being just two examples. The idea that assessment equals grades seems to be unique to education. When education does things differently to the learning we do in our normal lives, I tend to wonder why. I’m not sure the distinction between feedback and assessment really carries any weight beyond educational institutions. The separation we insist on within education, however, seems to have consequences for the ways we view learning and the how we ‘do’ feedback.
The distinction between feedback and assessment implies feedback is learning and assessment is assessment of learning. Assessment is something ‘tacked’ on to the end of learning in order to see if students have learnt. Feedback happens independently of assessment. I think the idea of teachers teaching, students learning exactly what the teacher has taught and students then demonstrating that learning in assessment is a conceptualization of the learning process that, with what we know today, is difficult to sustain. What we know about learning today is that the best learners are ‘self-regulated’ and that learning can and does frequently occur in spite of the teacher. Students do not ‘passively’ acquire the knowledge told to them, but rather are active participants using their prior knowledge and personal agency to learn. Viewing learning in this more ‘constructivist’ light blurs the lines between feedback, learning and assessment and should make us question what feedback is for.
In light of what we know about student learning, the ultimate aim of feedback should be to help students assess themselves. This aim is not well served by feedback that merely ‘tells’ students what they are doing well and what they should improve. This is teacher-directed, ignores student agency and suggests that what the teacher does is somehow more important than what the student does. Feedback, when done well, is fundamentally about students learning to assess themselves. Students give and receive feedback, they learn to seek it, they learn how to process it and learn what to do next based on that feedback. These are fundamentally assessment acts that lead to learning. The separation of feedback and assessment I think masks this assessment-feedback link.
The relationship between a PhD candidate and a supervisor is a good example of feedback as assessment. The supervisor is not only giving feedback so the PhD candidate can write a better thesis. They want the candidate to be able to assess for themselves what is expected, and what they need to do next. The supervisor hopes that the need for feedback becomes obsolete as the candidate becomes better able to assess themselves and make good decisions about what to do next. An overly helpful supervisor telling the candidate what to do and what not to do might be harming the candidate’s ability to function effectively after they receive their doctorate.
The cynic in me asks who benefits from this separation of feedback and assessment. It certainly isn’t the student. By separating feedback and assessment there is a danger that those with assessment and testing expertize claim power over what goes on in classrooms due to their knowledge of statistics and testing and assessment methods. We mustn’t let them. Teachers need to be empowered to assess in their classrooms, not only with grades (in fact rarely with grades), but with informal unplanned assessments that give teachers information about what to do next, and more importantly, allow students to judge what to do next. This can help students develop the assessment capabilities to judge for themselves what they need to do, how they need to do it, and what they need to work on in order to do something successfully. This continual assessment on the part of the student is rich learning. It is rich learning whether it is learning a sport, doing a PhD, learning a musical instrument or learning in our classrooms.
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