Dear colleagues and David, 
 
Thank you for the wonderful topic and lively discussions.  
 
My PhD thesis is about classroom assessment in language classrooms. The students I worked with were adult ESL learners in New York City. The focus of my research was on English oral proficiency. I am currently writing up my data-analysis chapters. For my project, I set up two treatment groups. One group of students received a set of ready-made criteria and the other created their own criteria as a class for oral proficiency. Two groups of students were comparable in terms of the distribution of students’ age, first language (L1), and gender. I am exploring if these two treatments yield different effects on students’ self-assessment outcomes, motivation for learning English, progress on oral proficiency, and interaction with one another during an oral task. When I proposed to carry out this study in 2004, I didn’t find any study that was designed to explore the effects of students’ involvement in the development of assessment criteria on their performance. Is it still the case? 
 
I was wondering if any expert in the panel could comment on the role that transparency of learning objectives and criteria plays in formative assessment. In my study, even though teachers and I made the goals of classroom assessment clear to students, there were still students who believed that it was unnecessary for them to be involved in the assessment process because they believed that teachers know the best. Are there any studies designed to look at the relationship between successful implementation of formative assessment and students’ learning styles or strategies? Perhaps, formative assessment doesn’t fit all? As for transparency of assessment criteria, is there any study designed to look at to what extent teachers or students are able to articulate assessment criteria for the ability in question? 
 
 
Many thanks in advance. 
Best wishes, 
Ann

> Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:40:41 -0500> From: djrosen at comcast.net> To: specialtopics at nifl.gov> Subject: [SpecialTopics 805] Formative assessment in other countries> > Colleagues,> > You can still ask questions or make comments on any of the case studies, > or on Janet's overview, but today I would also like to invite OECD > researchers from other countries to talk about their studies now, too. > Please chime in.> > What are some of the most interesting findings on how formative > assessment is used in the classroom?> How are students actively involved -- if they are -- in setting the > criteria, as well as in using the results of the assessments to improve > their learning.> What policies have supported formative assessment?> What policies have hindered it?> > David J. Rosen> Special Topics Discussion Moderator> djrosen at comcast.net> -------------------------------> National Institute for Literacy> Special Topics mailing list> SpecialTopics at nifl.gov> To unsubscribe or change your subscription settings, please go to http://www.nifl.gov/mailman/listinfo/SpecialTopics> Email delivered to shinyiann at hotmail.com

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