Engineering Formative Feedback Practices and Developing Assessment Literacy in Teacher Education via Instructor Modelling

Abstract

<p>This presentation discusses the affordances of Perusall as a pedagogic tool that engenders formative assessment through viewing ‘feedback as dialogue’ (Carless, 2016). Situated within the context of English language teacher education at a university in Hong Kong, it examines the instructor’s role and strategy use in modelling good feedback practices for course participants, who are pre- and in-service teachers of English, via Perusall.</p><p>Specifically, the presentation highlights strategies employed to foster a positive, motivating and supportive peer learning environment in the pre-, while- and post-phases of the course. It examines how the platform creates an avenue for pre-course dialogue on the syllabus, through which a co-constructed and ‘negotiated curriculum’ (Boomer et al., 2005; Edwards, 2011, Yuksel, 2010) is shaped. It shows how the instructor makes strategic use of the multiple functionalities on Perusall during the course to scaffold and enhance student-teachers’ knowledge and skill in their critical evaluation of texts through a structured peer review process. This process is guided by the ‘Students as Perusall Managers’ (Tavares, 2021) and ‘Students as Grammar Experts’ (Tavares, 2022) frameworks presented in Perusall Exchange 2021 and 2022. How the instructor models the level of criticality and constructive feedback expected of student-teachers, thereby empowering them to be effective peer reviewers and analysts of textbook and classroom excerpts, will also be explored. All this illustrates the potentialities of Perusall in promoting social learning beyond its traditionally established use as an e-reader of textbooks and references. The presentation further demonstrates how the instructor develops student-teachers’ assessment and feedback literacy (Carless & Bold, 2018) in the post-course stage via whole-class conversations on assignment exemplars and assessment rubrics. It concludes by emphasizing the impact of collaborative annotation in making student-teachers’ voices heard and thinking processes visible, on the basis of which formative assessment takes place.</p>