Developing Students’ Evaluative Judgment and Feedback Literacy through Self-assessment: An Experimental Study

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Despite the success of Hong Kong students on international tests (e.g., PISA, TIMSS;
Mullis et al., 2016; OECD, 2019), the Hong Kong education system has been criticized for
failing to equip students with appropriate skills for the knowledge economy (Forestier &
Crossley, 2014) and for developing long-term learning capacities (Tan, 2015), such as
evaluative judgment and feedback literacy that are crucial for life-long learning. 

 

Evaluative judgment and feedback literacy are fundamental goals of education at all levels (Carless & *Boud, 2018; Tai et al., 2018). They recognize that learning is more than the simple acquisition of knowledge, but involves student agency in judging their own work and proactively seeking and using inputs from others. Evaluative judgment is students' awareness of what they know and what they can do. Students need this awareness to learning effectively and attain future learning goals; without this awareness, they cannot readily identify their next step for learning to extend their
knowledge and actions (*Boud, in press). Feedback literacy is needed by students so that they can learn effectively from others (teachers, peers and a variety of other people). They need to be able to actively use the inputs from others to improve their work, but not be dependent on them. They need to be able to elicit what they need, process the information to obtain and enact their learning in their future assignments (Malecka et al., 2020).

However, the opportunities to develop these long-term capacities are limited in the current assessment practices in Hong Kong schools. As teachers typically dominate the assessment process and serve as the sole source of feedback for students (*Yan & Brown, 2020), educators have neglected students’ agency in (a) acquiring feedback from others and (b) learning quality standards with which to assess their own and others’ work. Furthermore, the research literature in this field has three major gaps. First, evaluative judgment and feedback literacy have been mainly discussed in conceptual terms.

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Empirical evidence of their impact on learning outcomes is scarce and our evidence supported
understanding is limited with regard to how to develop students’ evaluative judgment and feedback literacy via concrete instructional strategies. Second, current research on evaluative judgment and feedback literacy mainly focuses on higher education, with earlier education largely ignored. However, it is a long journey to develop students’ long-term competencies, such as evaluative judgment and feedback literacy, and, therefore, early development and uptake of these skills in primary and secondary schooling is important. Third, many educational interventions require too many teacher resources and hence, are less likely to be sustainable in the Hong Kong context where manpower is limited (*Yan et al., accepted). Fourth, although the self-assessment process
highlights the importance of psychological factors (*Yan & Brown, 2017; *Yan et al., 2020), researchers have designed self-assessment interventions primarily based on pedagogical principles (e.g., providing rubrics, scripts, feedback, etc.) without considering psychological processes (e.g., motivation to self-assess).

This proposed study addresses this challenge by identifying sustainable, simple, low-cost strategies to enhance students’ evaluative judgment, feedback literacy, and learning outcomes. This study also aims to help understand the mediation mechanisms underlying the relationship between the self-assessment and learning outcomes. The specific objectives are:

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1. To examine the effect of a self-assessment-based intervention on developing students’ evaluative judgment, feedback literacy, and learning outcomes;

2. To examine the role of the psychological prompts, via wise intervention techniques, in increasing the effect of a self-assessment-based intervention; and

3. To examine the mediating role of evaluative judgment and feedback literacy in the relationship between the self-assessment intervention and learning outcomes.

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