Barbara Crossouard

A socio‐cultural theorisation of formative assessment

Formative assessment has attracted increasing attention from both practitioners and scholars over the last decade. This paper draws on the authors’ empirical research conducted over eleven years in educational situations ranging from infant schools to postgraduate education to propose a theorisation of formative assessment. Formative assessment is seen as taking place when teachers and learners seek to respond to student work, making judgements about what is good learning with a view to improving that learning. However, the theorisation emphasises formative assessment as being a discursive social practice, involving dialectical, sometimes conflictual, processes. These bring into play issues of power in which learners’ and teachers’ identities are implicated and what counts as legitimate knowledge is framed by institutional discourses and summative assessment demands. The paper argues that, rather than only paying attention to the content of learning, an ambition for formative assessment might be to deconstruct these contextual issues, allowing a critical consideration of learning as a wider process of becoming. The article suggests a model that might be useful to teachers and learners in achieving this.

Developing Alternative Models of Doctoral Supervision with Online Formative Assessment

This paper reports on empirical research into formative assessment conducted in a blended learning environment within a professional doctorate in education (EdD.) programme in an English university, focusing primarily on peer discussion forum activity. This was conceptualised within sociocultural learning theories, where learning entails processes of identity formation. The data presented suggests the usefulness of online environments for supporting students’ development of subject positions as researchers, thereby constructing new relations between peers, as well as tutors and students, in addition to providing shared textual resources upon which the tutors feedback can then build. The paper discusses how this might contribute towards more collective forms of doctoral supervision.

Challenging Formative Assessment: Disciplinary Spaces and Identities.

What if knowledge is a form of doing, an engagement between a knowing subject and what is known? What if learning is a contextualised performance involving students engaging with prospective and current social identities, and therefore an ontological as well as an epistemological accomplishment? What then becomes of formative assessment within different disciplinary pedagogies? In this paper, we open up the possibility of formative assessment as encompassing a disciplinary meta‐discourse within the context of teaching as response. We draw on data from a postgraduate context to illustrate how the identities of teachers and learners may be brought into play. Formative assessment is seen to involve movement across a concrete–procedural–reflective–discursive–existential continuum, and between the convergent and divergent. We suggest that by asserting the centrality of disciplinary knowledge and identities, the frameworks presented may be used heuristically to entice academics into thinking more specifically and organically about pedagogies which are more appropriate to the changing nature of twenty‐first‐century higher education.

A sociocultural reflection on formative assessment and collaborative challenges in the states of Jersey

Drawing upon data arising from an evaluation carried out for the Jersey educational authority, this article discusses the interaction of two professional development initiatives, formative assessment and critical skills thinking, bringing the two initiatives together from the perspective of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). This allows the illumination of the power relations that are embedded within assessment practice and in consequence the importance of an instructional design that addresses these elements. After giving an overview of sociocultural learning theories and contextualising the research and the two initiatives in question, the article draws on the data to suggest the overlap between the mediating tool of a ‘challenge’ and the CHAT concept of an ‘activity system’. It discusses the value of constructing a shared, collective focus (or object) for task activity; the authenticity and extended experiential nature of the task; the collaborative division of labour in the execution of the task and its assessment. Drawing upon the evaluation data, it is suggested that formative assessment might focus more strongly on extended task design, with the aim of creating spaces for student agency that is nevertheless in dialogue with curricular requirements. This also entails paying more explicit attention to the social positioning of teachers and learners, as well as amongst learners themselves, and ensuring that power relations are not glossed over in discussions of assessment regimes. In this respect the concept of an activity system seems potentially useful to teachers, not only researchers, in engaging with the complexities of designing classroom activities that support students’ critical engagement and participation in different communities of practice.

Using Email for Formative Assessment with Professional Doctorate Students

This article reports on aspects of a recent research and development project in doctoral education. It focuses on the use of email for tutor’s formative assessment within the early stages of a Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD) in an English university. Its case study methodology included participant observation of the programme workshops, critical discourse analysis of the email texts, and two series of in‐depth, semi‐structured student interviews. The tutor whose feedback was analysed had previously researched and theorised formative assessment, so the research allowed his previous theoretical insights to be explored and developed in an early doctoral context. The article concludes by discussing the problematic power of feedback at this level, given the culturally constructed associations of feedback with summative assessment, and implications for supervisory practice.

Becoming researchers: a sociocultural perspective on assessment, learning and the construction of identity in a professional doctorate

The article reports on a small‐scale in‐depth research study investigating formative assessment enacted and theorised from a sociocultural perspective within a part‐time Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD) programme in an English university. Going beyond its conventional conceptualisation within psychological and motivational frameworks, formative assessment here encouraged students to view their learning as entailing the development of identities as researchers. The research adopted a case study approach, drawing upon participant observation, discourse analysis of online discussion forum and email feedback, and two series of student interviews. Although the practice of formative assessment remains problematic, students’ responses suggest the value of tutor feedback, including its ontological dimension. Given the wide‐ranging backgrounds of the learners who participated in this study, our findings suggest the relevance of a sociocultural view of formative assessment for supporting a more diverse doctoral student population. This leads us to argue for doctoral supervision to be conceptualised more firmly as a pedagogic relation in which formative assessment has a key role.

Gender in the neoliberalised global academy: the affective economy of women and leadership in South Asia

As higher education (HE) institutions globally become increasingly performative, competitive and corporatised in response to neoliberal rationalities, the exigencies of HE leadership are being realigned to accommodate its value system. This article draws on recent British Council-funded research, including 30 semi-structured interviews, to explore women’s engagement with leadership in HE in South Asia. A potent affective economy was discovered. Leadership was associated with affects such as competitiveness, aggression, impropriety, stress and anxiety, in ways that were intensified by highly patriarchal and corporatised HE cultures. Indeed, its difficulties and toxicities meant that leadership was rejected or resisted as an object of desire by many women. We illuminate how different forms of competition contribute to the affective economy of HE leadership. The research also raises wider questions about the possibilities of disrupting dominant neoliberal constructions of HE if those who question such values are excluded (or self-exclude) from leadership positions.

The doctoral viva voce as a cultural practice: the gendered production of academic subjects

This article reports on a recent small‐scale phenomenological study into the student experience of the doctoral viva voce. It was prompted by strong concerns about viva voce processes on the part of a Director of Graduate Studies in an English university. The study involved semi‐structured interviews with 20 respondents from eight English universities in a range of disciplinary areas. An initial analysis of the interviews illuminated the powerful affective dimensions of the viva voce and the gendered nature of its processes. Resisting the binary separation of reason and emotion, the paper draws upon discursive theories of affect, gender and subjectivity to consider the affective economies that are illuminated in this data and suggests that this involves the reproduction of gendered hierarchies.

Reforms to higher education assessment reporting: opportunities and challenges

This article responds to recent UK proposals on measuring and recording student achievement (Universities UK 2007) to highlight issues that are relevant across different higher education contexts, which are increasingly intertwined through the expansion of the Bologna process. Drawing from wide-ranging literature on assessment and sociology, this paper argues that the introduction of new assessment technologies cannot be seen from a purely technical perspective but instead requires a deeper appreciation of assessment as a social practice, which contributes powerfully to the construction of learner subjectivities in ways that are not necessarily benign. Although not suggesting this leads to any easy solutions, the concept of ‘meta-social’ awareness may be useful in better supporting a diverse student body in confronting the complexities of the twenty-first century.

Imagined futures: why are vocational learners choosing not to progress to HE?

This paper is based on a small‐scale mixed‐method research project, which was located in south‐east England and was funded by the British Academy. The project, investigated the factors that affected young people’s decisions not to progress to higher education (HE) after following a Level 3 vocational pathway in upper secondary education. Set against the context of divergent and somewhat contradictory government policy initiatives, it draws on the concept of imagined futures as a way of considering students’ ‘decision‐making’ in their transition from further education to other locations. This paper explores how a group of young people completing their vocational courses in summer 2008 viewed – or imagined – their futures. Contrary to policy discourses, vocational pathways did not necessarily offer straightforward progression to HE. Respondents’ ‘imagined futures’ did not lack agency, but HE was not an immediate part of them.