Shifting the Ownership of Assessment from Teachers to Students: A Discussion of Feedback Mechanism in an Academic English Writing Course

Abstract

This presentation will report on the implementation of English enhancement initiatives on feedback mechanism and discuss the shifting roles of teachers and students in the ownership of assessment for an Academic English writing course in the University of Hong Kong. The overall objective of this presentation is to report evaluative comments on peer feedback and assessment from the course developer, teachers and students for an discipline-specific course. This study seeks to address the theoretical issues in education by the emergent importance of feedback mechanism in an internationalized teaching and learning context. The presentation will unveil the changing and dynamic roles of teachers and students in peer assessment and the challenges of the implementation of feedback mechanism in different learning contexts. The project provides insights for course developers and teacher educators to open opportunities for discussion on feedback mechanism within an English writing classroom. Considering the growing trend and rapid development of e-Learning in an international education setting, this project seeks to fill the gap by exploring the opportunities for the use of Moodle as an online teaching and learning platform to facilitate peer assessment in an undergraduate English writing class. Specifically it aims to investigate how these aspects problematize teaching and learning and how they could be integrated into the curriculum development to promote students' active learning and enrich their out-of-class learning experience. The pedagogical significance is to concurrently contribute to the development of innovative curricular models in an undergraduate English course and a more comprehensive framework to guide future research in teaching and learning English writing across the curriculum. The practical contribution to the field is to provide operational guidelines and good practices for e-learning and feedback mechanism.

The triangulated research design entails mutually supporting data collection, including student questionnaires, focus group interviews with students and personal interviews with teachers. The use of multiple methods aims to solicit students’ and teachers’ views on the usefulness of peer assessment in academic English writing classrooms. Specific questions from the questionnaire cover students’ perceptions of the tailored-made e-Learning components on Moodle and peer assessment templates. The interviews are intended to collect students’ and teachers’ comments on materials design and applications of the materials to their disciplinary study and understand their learning motivation and experience. The target population of this project is the Year 2 undergraduate students for whom it is compulsory to take an academic English writing course in the University of Hong Kong. Drawing upon the voices from different stakeholders consisting of the course developer, teachers and students, with the timely support of e-Learning and teachers’ guidance, peer assessment can be successfully fostered in higher education through teaching and learning discipline-specific English writing. The key findings revealed that while the use of peer assessment can enhance students’ active learning through interacting with their peers via in-class and out-of-class learning activities, it also problematizes teaching and learning with the promotion of peer assessment in the English writing classroom. While teachers support peer assessment to increase a sense of responsibility in student learning and to fulfil learner autonomy, students tend to value teacher guidance and feedback more. While teachers use peer assessment to encourage student interaction and sustain collaboration among peers, students suggest anonymous peer feedback. The presentation will not only investigate what problematises teaching and learning with the use of peer assessment, it also discusses what constitutes effective feedback mechanism. It is important to ensure that both teachers and learners are well aware of the genuine purpose and expectation of peer assessment which may vary to assessment tasks and learning contexts. The ultimate goal is to make learning more motivating via feedback mechanism. Overall this research project helps us critically evaluate how the use of feedback mechanism has strong prospects for enriching students’ learning experience in peer assessment and strengthening an academic English writing curricular. It also gives us insights into the best practices of feedback mechanism for sustainable development in international education in higher education.