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GORDON ELDRIDGE: LESSONS IN LEARNING

Does Assessment for Learning Support Student Self-regulation?

By Gordon Eldridge, TIE Columnist
24-May-16


The research: Baas, D., Castelijns, J., Vermeulen, M., Martens, R., & Segers, M. (2015) “The Relation between Assessment for Learning and Elementary Students’ Cognitive and Metacognitive Strategy Use.” British Journal of Educational Psychology, 85, 33–46.
There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about Assessment for Learning (AfL) and how it differs from Assessment of Learning (AoL), but as with much in education it is difficult to find an unambiguous definition spelling out exactly what we mean by these terms. What do we mean by learning, and what do we mean by the assessment that is likely to support that definition of learning?
Let’s start with learning itself. We could define it in terms of the three kinds of learning promoted by the Common Ground Collaborative: deepening of understanding, building mastery of competencies, and developing character traits. Effective Assessment for Learning should theoretically improve outcomes in all of these areas and much research has looked at the effect of AfL strategies on outcomes. The real power of AfL, however, would seem to be the extent to which it can support learners in learning how to learn. This would mean looking at the aspects of learning that support students in becoming self-regulated learners: self-regulated builders of understanding, competency, and character.
This was the angle taken by a group of Dutch researchers, who explored the extent to which AfL strategies can foster students’ ability to regulate their own learning by using both cognitive and metacognitive strategies. Thus the definition of AfL, for the purposes of this study, was assessment that supports the development of self-regulatory capacity.
Self-regulation in the Dutch study was defined using Zimmerman’s three phases of task performance:
(1) forethought – including task analysis, goal-setting, and planning for strategy use;
(2) performance – including execution of learning strategies, monitoring the effectiveness of strategies, and making adjustments where necessary and;
(3) reflection – including evaluation of performance and strategy use, attribution of results to particular causal factors, and consideration of the implications for future learning activities.
In particular, these researchers wanted to investigate whether two specific AfL processes might support greater self-regulation in learners. The AfL processes investigated were:
• monitoring student growth in order to help them understand where they are in their learning
• scaffolding in order to shed light on the next step for each student in the learning process
It was noted that a great deal of research has looked into the ability of older learners to regulate their learning, but that younger learners have often been neglected because of a belief that they may not yet possess the necessary knowledge and strategies. These researchers therefore decided to focus their study on learners between grades four and six.
Five hundred twenty-eight students from seven Dutch elementary schools were included in the study. Two questionnaires were used to measure the variables. One measured the extent to which AfL strategies were in use in classrooms (Student Assessment for Learning Questionnaire - SAFL) and the other measured the learners’ use of self-regulatory competencies (Children’s Perceived Use of Self-Regulated Learning Inventory - CP-SRLI).
What were the results of the study?
• Monitoring activities that helped students understand where they were in their learning and become aware of their strengths and weaknesses predicted productive student behavior in Zimmerman’s forethought phase of self-regulated learning. The researchers were surprised that this process had no effect on student strategy use during the performance phase and no effect on behavior during the reflection phase. They hypothesized that this may have been due to the quality of the feedback given. They believe it may be possible that students this young require more detailed feedback from their teachers in order to effectively draw inferences from the information that they can use to steer their subsequent learning.
• Scaffolding activities that helped students understand their next steps in learning positively predicted strategy use during the performance phase of self-regulation and stimulated them to reflect on their learning.
What might this mean for our classrooms?
It seems that monitoring student progress, even if we use that information to help students understand the gap between their current performance and the learning goals, while necessary, may not be sufficient to support students in becoming self-regulated learners. Students also need scaffolding that helps them understand what their next steps might be. Research suggests, however, that the next steps should not be prescribed by the teacher, but should rather be developed in collaboration with the learner. Effective feedback should provide the scaffold that stimulates student thinking and reflection.
The researchers also note that effective AfL also has implications for the design of assessment tasks. If we discuss the use of strategies with learners, and explicitly teach these strategies, the assessment tasks we design need to afford the use of the strategies.




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