This is a review of “Enhancing formative assessment as the way of boosting students’ performance and achieving learning outcomes.” Chapter 8 of Early Career Academics’ Reflections on Learning to Teach in Central Europe, by Nikita Minin, Masaryk University.
Nikita Minin of Masaryk University is motivated by a goal we can all appreciate: ensuring that his students achieve the learning outcomes of his course. In his case, the course is a graduate seminar on theories of IR and energy security and the learning outcomes include improving student skills in critical thinking and writing. He noticed that students in his class did not seem to really improve on these skills during the class, and introduced three teaching interventions in an attempt to fix this.
First, Minin provided more intense instruction on the writing assignments at the start of the course, providing a grading rubric and examples of successful student work. Second, he gave students audio rather than written feedback on their papers. Finally, using a sequential assessment system, the instructor gave formative feedback first and grades much later in the course. Minin assessed the impact of these three interventions, comparing course sections with and without them, and concluded that the first two interventions achieved the objective of improving student achievement of the learning outcomes.
The interventions described in the chapter are in line with current thinking regarding in-course assessment. While Minin does not use the language of transparent teaching, his first intervention falls exactly in line with the Transparency in Teaching and Learning Project’s (TILT)approach. Transparency calls on instructors to openly communicate about the purpose of an assignment, the tasks they are to complete, and the criteria for success, and Minin does exactly that in this first intervention. Given the data so far on the TILT project, it is not surprising that Minin saw some success by taking this approach. Likewise, now-ubiquitous learning management systems allow for giving feedback in multiple platforms, including audio and video. For years now, advocates for audio-based feedback claim that this can be a more effective tool than written feedback. Minin’s observations therefore, also fit nicely in line with existing work.
Where the chapter falls short, then, is not in the design of its interventions, but in the claims made based on the available data. The sample sizes are tiny, with just five students receiving the interventions. With final grades used as the primary dependent variable, it is difficult to tease out the independent impact of each of the three changes. Using final grades is also an issue when the experimenter is also the person who assigns grades, as it is more difficult to avoid bias than when more objective or blind items are used. Lang’s (2016) bookSmall Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learningtells us that engaging in self-reflection is itself an intervention, and Minin’s use of minute-paper style self-reflections to assess the impact of feedback, while itself an interesting and potentially useful idea, mean that a fourth intervention was used in the course. While I do not doubt Minin’s observations that his interventions had a positive impact, as they are backed by existing research, the evidence in the chapter does not strongly advance our confidence in those findings.
However, I have never been one to dismiss good teaching ideas simply because of a lack of strong evidence from a particular instructor. Minin highlights a crucial concern—that we should never assume that our courses are teaching what we intend them to teach, and that ‘time and effort’ do not necessarily achieve the desired results, even for graduate students. Reflecting on this, seeking out innovative solutions, and then assessing the impact is a process we should all be following, and Minin sets a great example.