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Forums > Interaction of peer & tutor feedback Session > Crossouard & Pryor case study
Subject: A response to Lewis's comments from Barbara and John

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Barbara Crossouard
Posts: 3
31/05/2007 09:37  
Yesterday we were invited to start off the chat by posting our responses to Lewis's reading of our case study, so just posting this again in here.

Louis’ comments are interesting in themselves, but we feel that they haven’t completely picked up on the conceptualisation of formative assessment that we use in the case study, which is based in sociocultural learning theories – what has started to be called third generation formative assessment – with first generation being based in behaviourist learning theory, second generation in motivational theories, and third generation being socio cultural learning theories. These also combine well with sociological writers such as Bernstein and Bourdieu.

An important aspect of what is talked about in this case study is that the tutor actively collaborates with the students during the development of the assessment task. Thus this is not just tacked on at the end of the module, but designed so that students and tutor are collaboratively engaged in a task that aims to be as authentic as possible in relation to them developing an identity in the community of practice of this particular academic discipline. This relates to the ‘existential’ dimension in the framework on p.4), although the summative assessment judgement is made by the tutorial team (not just one tutor), as representatives of the institution.

This means though that there’s also therefore some misreading of the case study in the terms of the ‘firm distinction’ between formative and summative assessment that Lewis suggests we make. We see them as being in dialogue throughout the task development process through the tutor’s engagement with the students. We use the notion of moving between convergent and divergent assessment to describe what the tutor is doing in terms of trying to bring students’ texts into dialogue with whatever the assessment task demands and their criteria are.

In other writing (Torrance and Pryor, 1998) John has long ago critiqued the naïve separation of formative and summative assessment, and assumptions that one is good and the other bad, that resonate throughout a lot of literature. We would argue instead that all assessment has formative effects, and whether these might be good or bad is an empirical question. The notion of moving between convergent and divergent assessment are quite useful we feel for bringing the two into dialogue with each other, and avoiding this false binary.

Hope this clarifies our position a little.

Barbara
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Forums > Interaction of peer & tutor feedback Session > Crossouard & Pryor case study > A response to Lewis's comments from Barbara and John


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