Are Students Receptive to Formative Assessment When Authoring Wiki Projects?

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Abstract

The primary objective of this research was to investigate whether formative assessment was conductive to learning. The secondary objective was to examine if peer assessment was an effective pedagogy for wiki-based projects. Two formative assessments were designed according to assessment for learning principles. A total of forty-eight students participated in the study. They formed ten groups in which they authored wiki pages by applying the skills and knowledge learned in previous classes. An assessment rubric was also given to the students so that they could have a better understanding of the expected outcomes. To improve the projects, students were required to learn from and give constructive comments to two randomly assigned groups. Data were collected from multiple sources: a questionnaire, opinions expressed in e-mails, access logs gathered by the wiki site, and scores collected in the discussion forum. Findings indicated that the two research objectives have been met, as students perceived that the formative assessments helped them improve their wiki projects; they particularly appreciated the joint effort involved in peer assessment. The number and contents of the messages posted on the discussion forum indicated that the students were serious in giving feedback to peers whilst the revision logs of the wiki pages showed that they were very receptive to feedback as well. However, there were large discrepancies between the responses collected from emails and the questionnaire regarding the usefulness of the teacher’s feedback. One plausible reason could be due to students understanding that their names were known to the teacher when qualitative data were collected via emails whilst quantitative data were collected anonymously. The findings collected from multiple sources enable readers to have a comprehensive understanding of the answers to the research questions posed.