Formative Assessment and Feedback in Higher Education: Preparing Spanish Academics to Teach in a Digital World

Introduction

Assessment conditions of what and how students learn (Henderson et al., 2019). A poor choice of assessment activities leads to poor learning and distorts what students are eventually capable of doing. At university there is still a predominance of summative and little practice of formative assessment (López-Pastor, 2017), despite it being known that students do not learn from grading but from assessment processes. One of the reasons for this practice lies in academics’ beliefs, as will be addressed later.

Formative assessment also known as assessment for learning. According to Black and William (2009), formative assessment refers “to the extent that evidence about student achievement is elicited, interpreted, and used by teachers, learners, or their peers, to make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded, than the decisions they would have taken in the absence of the evidence that was elicited” (p.9). These authors state that formative assessment can be conceptualized as consisting in five strategies: 1) clarifying and sharing learning objectives and criteria for success; 2) articulating effective learning tasks that elicit evidence of student understanding; 3) providing feedback that moves learners forward; 4) activating students as instructional resources for one another; and 5) activating students as the owners of their learning. Moreover, when done well, this type of assessment promotes student satisfaction, since students have a better understanding of the learning path (McConlogue, 2020).

Thus, feedback is an integral part of formative assessment (Hamodi et al., 2015; Wiliam, 2018) and one of the determining factors in student learning (Cano et al., 2020; Gibbs & Simpson, 2009; Hattie, 2008). Although it has been widely defined, below is a clear, concise definition by authors working in this area: “feedback is a process through which learners make sense of the information from various sources and use it to enhance their work or learning strategies” (Carless & Boud, 2018, p. 1315). In recent decades, feedback has been reconceptualized and is no longer seen simply as comments delivered from the teacher to the student, but as a process which implies student engagement (Boud & Dawson, 2021).

According to the systematic review of the literature by Morris et al. (2021), feedback in higher education should be included in the evaluative practice of faculty teachers as it helps to develop students’ competences and learning (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). Additionally, in an interconnected and technological context in which the university is immersed, the digital competence of the teacher is vital. Moreover, using new technologies is often seen as a way to make feedback more effective (Cumming & Rodriquez, 2017; Yuan & Kim, 2015).

Despite its evident importance, this issue has been little studied in educational practice and research (Boud & Dawson, 2021). Nowadays, integrating feedback into teaching–learning processes is a challenge (Jensen et al., 2021), due to the absence of adequate training (Sanahuja & Sánchez-Tarazaga, 2018) and teachers’ beliefs and myths around this concept (Boud & Molloy, 2013). We would like to make a further point about beliefs.

The way teachers conduct formative assessment is strongly influenced by their beliefs and values about the importance of feedback within the context of a learning process (Brown, 2018; Karim, 2015). Prior studies show the impact of teachers’ conceptions on their assessment and teaching practices (Amhag et al., 2020; Asghar, 2012; Brown et al., 2011; Myyry et al., 2022; Panadero & Brown, 2017). Designing feedback processes takes place within a complex interaction of intrapersonal, interpersonal, and contextual influences. As stated by Winstone and Carles (2020), this interaction creates feedback ‘cultures’. Assessment practices thus become influenced by different factors such as class size, the importance allocated to teaching and research, or predisposition to experimentation versus conforming to normative assessment practices.