This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licensestudents may be motivated but there can only a few winners so there are many more students who know they have
no chance of winning. Another problem with interpersonal competition in assessment is that the focus can become
winning rather than understanding the material.
Teachers who communicate to their students that ability is incremental and that the goal of assessment is
promoting learning rather that ranking students, or awarding prizes to those who did very well, or catching those
who did not pay attention, are likely to enhance students’ motivation.
Choosing assessments
The choice of assessment task also influences students’ motivation and confidence. First, assessments that have
clear criteria that students understand and can meet rather than assessments that pit students against each other in
interpersonal competition enhances motivation (Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall, Wiliam, 2004). This is consistent
with the point we made in the previous section about the importance of focusing on enhancing learning for all
students rather than ranking students. Second, meaningful assessment tasks enhance student motivation. Students
often want to know why they have to do something and teachers need to provide meaningful answers. For example,
a teacher might say, “You need to be able to calculate the area of a rectangle because if you want new carpet you
need to know how much carpet is needed and how much it would cost.” Well designed performance tasks are often
more meaningful to students than selected response tests so students will work harder to prepare for them.
Third, providing choices of assessment tasks can enhance student sense of autonomy and motivation according
to self determination theory (see Chapter 6). Kym, the sixth grade teacher whose story began this chapter, reports
that giving students choices was very helpful. Another middle school social studies teacher Aaron, gives his students
a choice of performance tasks at the end of the unit on the US Bill of Rights. Students have to demonstrate specified
key ideas but can do that by making up a board game, presenting a brief play, composing a rap song etc. Aaron
reports that students work much harder on this performance assessment which allows them to use their strengths
than previously when he did not provide any choices and gave a more traditional assignment. Measurement experts
caution that a danger of giving choices is that the assessment tasks are no longer equivalent and so the reliability of
scoring is reduced so it is particularly important to use well designed scoring rubrics. Fourth, assessment tasks
should be challenging but achievable with reasonable effort (Elliott, McGregor & Thrash, 2004). This is often hard
for beginning teachers to do, who may give assessment tasks that are too easy or too hard, because they have to
learn to match their assessment to the skills of their students.
Providing feedback
When the goal is assessment for learning, providing constructive feedback that helps students know what they
do and do not understand as well as encouraging them to learn from their errors is fundamental. Effective feedback
should be given as soon as possible as the longer the delay between students’ work and feedback the longer students
will continue to have some misconceptions. Also, delays reduce the relationship between student s’ performance and
the feedback as students can forget what they were thinking during the assessment. Effective feedback should also
inform students clearly what they did well and what needs modification. General comments just as “good work, A”,
or “needs improvement” do not help students understand how to improve their learning. Giving feedback to
students using well designed scoring rubrics helps clearly communicate strengths and weaknesses. Obviously
grades are often needed but teachers can minimize the focus by placing the grade after the comments or on the last
Educational Psychology 268 A Global Text