Introduction

In this chapter, I discuss a key aspect of writing portfolio assessment, namely feedback which conceptually underpins reflection and self-assessment. Here, feedback refers to both verbal and written ones which support effective learning. First, the role of feedback in portfolio assessment will be defined and then exemplified. Second, the relationship between feedback and self-regulated learning is discussed, because formative feedback is able to motivate students to monitor, regulate and evaluate their composing processes. Third, using self-regulatory feedback as a form of learning-enhancing classroom assessment is explained. Fourth, I present how two writing teachers experimented with diverse portfolio systems, with one trying out different strategies of feedback provision and the other innovating feedback about self-regulation. Drawing upon these two  cases, I argue for the importance of nurturing feedback literacy among teachers, students and administrators in the portfolio-based classroom setting. Finally, the chapter concludes with an evaluation task analysing the feedback practices in the aforementioned case studies and a discussion task suggesting how to make feedback utilization a sustainable learning experience.

Role of Feedback in Portfolio Assessment

Feedback plays a pivotal role in educational assessment. In the context of writing portfolio assessment, feedback is broadly defined as assessment information which helps improve teaching and learning of writing at the classroom level. Feedback entails numerical marks, letter grades, percentage, qualitative commentaries and interactive annotations and takes various forms such as verbal, written or online feedback. It has positive and negative impacts on student learning. For instance, students tend to be distracted by marks/grades assigned by the teacher; thus, they only focus on performance rather than on learning. However, with self-explanatory and actionable feedback, namely qualitative commentaries, students are likely to uptake teacher feedback and make sensible revisions which improve overall writing performance. While feedback is beneficial for learning writing, we still have very little knowledge about when, how and why students apply and utilize particular types of written corrective feedback for revisions (cf. Han and Hyland 2015; Lee 2017). Additionally, we are uncertain about why some students can more successfully revise their drafts via written feedback than the others in a writing portfolio programme (e.g. Hamp-Lyons 2006).

The role of feedback in writing portfolio assessment comprises the following three significant aspects: purpose, source and levels of utilization. Feedback can be classified into three key purposes, namely formative, summative and evaluative. Formative feedback refers to assessment information which supports student learning, whereas summative feedback is about judging student learning, usually involving grades as in tests and examinations. Evaluative feedback serves the purpose of reporting student learning to key stakeholders including parents, principals and administrators. Despite these distinctions, feedback can serve multiple purposes concurrently, depending on how teachers and students utilize relevant assessment data for improving instructional practices and their learning of writing. Regarding the source of feedback, it typically refers to self-, peer and teacher feedback. Self-generated feedback is derived from reflection and self-assessment practices. It is also defined as internally generated feedback. If utilized appropriately, self-generated feedback could bring about self-regulated learning (Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick 2006). For peer and teacher feedback, it refers to externally generated feedback and students are usually on the receiving end of the feedback process. In the formative assessment scholarship, researchers advocate the centrality of self-generated feedback as it promulgates mastery of the learning-how-to-learn skills and helps students become lifelong learners for their study careers and beyond. The levels of utilization refer to major revisions (i.e. change in overall meanings); minor revisions (i.e. change in grammatical forms but meanings remain intact); addition; deletion; and substitution. While students are encouraged to adopt a range of revising strategies, most written corrective feedback scholars have reported that a majority of L2 students, especially for those who are less capable, tend to focus on minor revisions and deletions when revising the interim drafts (Bitchener and Storch 2016). The subsequent section discusses the relationship between feedback and self-regulated learning and then how feedback facilitates student development of self-regulated learning.

Feedback and Self-regulated Learning

According to Butler and Winne (1995), feedback is central to self-regulated learning. In their seminal work, they analysed the relationship between feedback and self-regulated learning. Based on their review, they argued the distinction between externally generated and internally generated feedback, where the latter could facilitate the uptake of the former when students are fully engaged in reflection, self- and peer assessment with reference to agreed-upon rubrics. After their synthesis, Black and Wiliam (1998) published the genesis of assessment for learning, wherein they systemically associate formative assessment practices with self-regulated learning. They contended that constructive classroom assessment approaches bring about actionable feedback information which enhances academic achievements and self-regulated learning. More recently, Clark (2012) develops a theoretical framework for the formative assessment theory which conceptually emphasizes how feedback serves to facilitate the development of self-regulated learning based on a comprehensive synthesis of cross-disciplinary knowledge base. In Clark’s concentric-circled model, feedback is situated at the centre, surrounded by planning, monitoring and reflecting in the second ring which constitutes the basis of metacognitive monitoring strategies in the third ring to support self-regulated learning in the fourth outer ring. As revealed in the above studies, feedback does play a critical role in facilitating students to regulate various aspects of their cognition, motivation and behaviours during learning.

In L2 writing classrooms, feedback enables students to metacognitively participate in the portfolio processes, namely collection, selection and reflection. The role of feedback in writing portfolio assessment is illustrated in Fig. 1.1, Chap. 1. By referring to the learning goals and assessment criteria with self-generated feedback, students can make informed decisions concerning what, how and why they collect and select most appropriate entries for compilation. As one key component of portfolio assessment, self-generated feedback also serves as a catalyst for reflection which encourages students to self-monitor and self-regulate their writing development over time. Since portfolio assessment of writing emphasizes collection (analysis of tasks and review of entries relating to goals), selection (monitoring and regulating learning of writing) and reflection (evaluation of writing development and adjustment of composing strategies; Hamp-Lyons and Condon 2000), these processes are in parallel with Zimmerman’s (2000) three-phase model of self-regulation which entails forethought (involving goal-setting and making plans); performance (involving self-monitoring and deploying learning management strategies); and reflection (evaluating student own work with feedback). In particular, the performance phase and the selection stage in portfolio compilation are almost identical, whereas the reflection phase in both Zimmerman’s model and Hamp-Lyon and Condon’s framework can be said to perform the same formative function, in which students utilize both externally generated and internally generated feedback to modify their composing strategies with reference to the set learning goals. The act of self-evaluation (or reflection) facilitates self-regulatory feedback mechanisms, which make students become owners of their learning and promote active learner agency in the portfolio development process. In the next section, I discuss how self-regulatory feedback can be adopted to close student learning gaps within the context of writing portfolio assessment.

Self-regulatory Feedback as a Learning-Enhancing Tool

In the educational assessment literature, scholars have long advocated to use feedback to promote self-regulated learning (Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick 2006). Their argument is that simply providing feedback to students does not necessarily warrant learning enhancement and academic achievements. Such a teacher-centric approach to feedback generally results in learner dependence, misinterpretations of feedback information and/or inability to respond to feedback (Black 2015; Sadler 2010). In fact, feedback provision and utilization are advised to be generated from students themselves under the aegis of peers/teachers as more capable gurus, since feedback only becomes pedagogically beneficial when it is actively utilized for metacognitive monitoring and, hence, internalized by students for upgrading learning (Andrade 2010). In Hattie and Timperley’s (2007) feedback model, they have robustly argued that feedback works when it addresses these three questions: where am I going? (goal-setting and planning); how am I going? (self-monitoring of learning progress); and where to next? (revising and adjusting learning), operating at the four levels of feedback, namely feedback about the task, feedback about the processing of the task, feedback about self-regulation and feedback about the self as a person. They reveal that feedback about processing (e.g. hints about the process of handling a task) and feedback about self-regulation (e.g. capability to produce internally generated feedback) are the most effective in closing student learning gaps as these two types of feedback promote deep learning and trigger metacognitive actions which facilitate self-regulated learning.

In Lam’s (2014) adapted conceptual model of self-regulation in portfolio assessment, students are expected to utilize their metacognitive thinking to analyse the writing task, set learning goals, mobilize composing strategies and perform self-assessment while reviewing portfolio entries for their portfolios. These self-monitoring processes are encapsulated in the key features of portfolio assessment, namely collection, selection and reflection. The aforementioned mechanisms help create student-generated internal feedback which embraces genre knowledge, metacognitive knowledge, self-efficacy beliefs and revising behaviours.

Similar to what McGarrell and Verbeem (2007) proposed, this internally generated feedback is further mediated by formative feedback from peers, teachers and multimedia resources when students revise their interim drafts during the portfolio compilation process. Nevertheless, McGarrell and Verbeem (2007) argue that unless teachers provide formative feedback emphasizing an inquisitive stance to encourage students to examine their writing problems critically, it is less likely for students to make successful revision across drafts. Unquestionably, student-generated internal feedback, if used in a goal-targeted, process-oriented and portfolio-based classroom setting, is likely to support self-regulated learning in writing, particularly when this feedback enables students to think metacognitively about where they are going; how they are going; and where to next. These three questions also help students to close their learning gaps by reviewing, reflecting upon and readjusting their personal goals for future writing development. In the following, I report on two context-specific case studies. The first one is about feedback provision in two portfolio assessment systems, and the second one deals with how two secondary-level teachers introduced feedback about self-regulation in their writing classrooms.

Case Study 5: Experimentation of Two Portfolio Assessment Systems: Feedback Provision

William is an English instructor serving in one community college which primarily provides two-year associate degree programmes for Grades 11 and 13 school-leavers. Students in the community college are 17–19 years old with intermediate to below average English proficiency. Their average IETLT band score is 5.5. As the English team leader in the foundation writing programme, William piloted two portfolio assessment systems in two Year 1 classes in which the students majored in social work. The first portfolio system is called the working portfolio programme, and the second one is called the showcase portfolio programme. Both portfolio-based programmes were carried out in one 15-week semester. The two intact groups were taught by William, and the students in either class had comparable English standards when admitted to the associate degree programme via a standardized entrance examination. The working portfolio programme aimed at providing students with self-, peer and teacher feedback for improving their writing ability and textual quality throughout the programme. A typical example of a working portfolio programme is shown in Fig. 5.1. The showcase portfolio programme intended to promote learner autonomy in writing by motivating students to perform self- and peer assessment during the semester. Near the end of the semester, they were required to select two representative works for teacher comments and subsequently compile them in their portfolios. A typical example of a showcase portfolio programme is shown in Fig. 5.2.

Fig. 5.1
figure 1

An example of a working portfolio programme

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Fig. 5.2
figure 2

An example of a showcase portfolio programme

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Drawing upon student interviews, student reflective journals and documentary analysis, William planned to look into 16 students’ affective and cognitive responses to the two portfolio programmes, with 8 students in each programme. More specifically, he wanted to know which type of feedback (self-, peer or teacher feedback) students benefited from most and which aspects of writing students could improve on in their revisions. After a rigorous data analysis, Wiliam found that in the working portfolio group, students processed and utilized almost the equal amount of peer and teacher feedback in their interim drafts (approximately 50%), and yet in the final drafts, they tended to adopt more teacher feedback in their revisions (around 70%). In the showcase portfolio group, students initially adopted more self-generated feedback in their interim drafts. However, they adopted more than 80% of teacher feedback as compared to self- and peer feedback in the final drafts. This finding was not surprising, since the student did not get feedback from their teachers until Week 13. Considering the quality of textual revisions, students from the working portfolio group had more improvement in their writing, especially in terms of idea development, richness in content and fluency. More importantly, they made more discourse-level revisions than word-level or sentence-level revisions in order to consolidate clearer ideas in texts and make their works more reader-friendly, whereas the opposite findings were identified for the showcase portfolio group who mainly made word-level revisions and had little improvement in their writing such as content, coherence and accuracy. Additionally, four students from the showcase portfolio group were sceptical about the usefulness of portfolio assessment, given that some of their classmates procrastinated to compose the interim drafts not until the deadline for submitting two representative works was approaching.

Based on William’s portfolio tryout, it appears that a majority of students preferred teacher feedback to self- and peer feedback despite their attempts to incorporate self- and peer feedback in their interim and final drafts. With that said, L2 students may need additional instructed guidance, sustained encouragement and metacognitive scaffolding concerning active participation in the portfolio compilation process, because after all writing portfolio assessment remains cognitively challenging to them. It takes time, efforts and motivation for students to improve their writing by an alternative assessment approach. Besides, the giving of teacher feedback should be made more learner-centric and self-regulatory, so that students can process it using their own judgements and critical thinking skills, and avoid creating copy-editing corrections, wherein they simply follow what the teacher suggests in their feedback. For instance, as reflected in the findings from the showcase portfolio group, the students mainly adopted teacher feedback in the final drafts without making considerable discourse-related revision changes. Such passivity in revision is very likely to bring about surface learning, learnt helplessness and procrastination.

Case Study 6: Innovation of Portfolio Assessment: Feedback About Self-regulation

Benson has taught in a local middle-range secondary-level school for eight years. In his Grade 10 class, he decided to pilot a process-oriented portfolio programme in one semester and wanted to see whether his students improved in their writing. The portfolio programme had four writing cycles, building on four composition topics from the school textbook. Students were expected to write one interim draft and one final draft for each writing topic. Peer assessment was encouraged after students completed the interim drafts. Using an action research approach, Benson utilized focus group interviews and composition analysis as the key research instruments. To evaluate the effectiveness of the programme, Benson focused on one student, Samson, as a case scenario. Samson had a good command of spoken and written English. When analysing feedback provision and utilization, Benson adopted Hattie and Timperley’s (2007: 90) four levels of feedback which addressed the question ‘where to next?’ for closing student learning gaps in writing, namely feedback about task, feedback about process, feedback about self-regulation and feedback about self.

When Benson examined one of Samson’s interim drafts, he found that Samson mainly included direct corrective feedback (an instance of feedback about task) more than indirect one (an instance of feedback about process) and focused on the correctness of grammatical items. Although Benson did include a content error comment by asking Samson to give one example of what charity work was in the second paragraph, Samson seemed to ignore this feedback. When Samson was asked to select two representative works near the end of the programme, he failed to do so, showing his lack of ability to respond to both feedback about process and feedback about self-regulation even with the presence of guided selection criteria and exemplars. Benson also checked Samson’s revised drafts, which looked almost the same as the first drafts with minor changes in grammatical forms and substitution of phrases. From this scenario, Samson slackened when doing his revisions, probably due to the fact that he lacked motivation or misinterpreted that he had to include all teacher corrective feedback in the final drafts. Apart from feedback about task (correctness of grammatical forms), Benson should have provided Samson with more feedback about process (e.g. putting the ending first would make more sense as you are writing a news report) and feedback about self-regulation (e.g. what do you put after presenting this argument? You have learnt that in Lecture 2). With these two types of feedback, students are likely to close the gaps in their portfolio tasks. Considering the inadequacy of giving and responding to feedback about self-regulation in the above two case studies, the next section discusses what and how student and teacher development of feedback literacy can be promoted in writing portfolio classrooms.

Pedagogical Implications for Promoting Feedback Literacy

To support feedback provision and utilization, it is imperative to nurture student and teacher development of feedback literacy in the writing portfolio classrooms. From the feedback literature, we understand that providing students with intensive training in understanding, interpreting and processing feedback is of vital importance, since we cannot take it for granted that students can internalize peer and teacher feedback automatically, especially for those students who are less academically capable and unfamiliar with process-oriented assessments (Hyland and Hyland 2006; Lam 2015). Further, creating a culture of equity is pedagogically crucial as most students tend to value teacher feedback much more than self-generated and peer feedback (as reported in Case Study 5; Gottlieb 2016). Reverence for the teacher as an authority figure seems to be uncritically predominant in the East Asian context (Littlewood 1999). It takes time for students to build up trust towards the utilization of internally generated feedback and develop equal status in the assessment process, where students are typically expected to play a passive and reactive role.

Likewise, teachers need to shift their feedback practices from being other-regulation-oriented to being self-regulation-oriented. For instance, instead of giving direct corrective feedback to students like what Benson did, teachers may consider providing feedback about process and feedback about self-regulation throughout the portfolio process, so that students will have more opportunities to think about how to resolve task-related problems and engage in reflective practices. Because of this, teachers are expected to receive proper writing assessment literacy training via regular university-based courses, face-to-face seminars, webinars, academic conferences or peer sharing through collaboration and professional conversations (Crusan et al. 2016). Additionally, they have to change their beliefs or teaching philosophies that teacher feedback is more revisable than self- and peer feedback. As long as students are trusted and closely supervised when utilizing self-generated feedback, they are able to self-monitor and accordingly revise their works more autonomously (Heritage 2013). Although it may be a tall order for some students to utilize self-regulatory feedback in the portfolio-based classrooms, teachers should remain hopeful that they can metacognitively manage their writing development and eventually become owners of their learning in the near future.

In sum, promoting feedback literacy in writing portfolio assessment is beyond the mastery of knowledge and skills in giving, receiving and adopting written feedback to support text revision. Indeed, feedback literacy is a communal practice where students, teachers and parents are empowered to play a facilitative role in enhancing student metacognitive monitoring capacity throughout the portfolio compilation process. Nurturing student and teacher development of feedback literacy involves time commitment, resource allocation, change in mindsets, motivation and enrichment in assessment knowledge (Xu and Brown 2016). To make feedback practices effective in writing portfolio assessment, teachers, students and key stakeholders should work hand in hand, because promulgating feedback literacy is a concerted effort rather than an individual endeavour.

Evaluation Task

To complete the evaluation task, reread Case Studies 5 and 6 and answer the following questions:

  1. 1.

    In Case Studies 5 and 6, which writing portfolio programme is more suitable for application in your work context and why?

  2. 2.

    As reflected in both case studies, most students tended to prefer teacher feedback to self- and peer feedback. Could you suggest some practical ideas which motivate students to create, process and utilize self-generated feedback for text revision?

  3. 3.

    In William’s showcase portfolio programme, do you think it was somewhat late to provide students with teacher feedback? In your opinion, when do teachers give written feedback to students during the portfolio compilation process and why?

  4. 4.

    In Benson’s classroom scenario, why did Samson remain unable to make discourse-level revision, given that he was a more capable student with a good command of written English? What factors contribute to Samson’s failure to revise drafts effectively?

  5. 5.

    If William gets a chance to experiment with the showcase portfolio programme again, what logistical issues should he bear in mind in order to make students successfully participate in the portfolio programme?

  6. 6.

    In pairs or small groups, evaluate the extent to which William’s and Benson’s trialing of writing portfolio assessment is pedagogically sound in terms of feedback provision and utilization.

Discussion Task

Feedback and Reflection

Oftentimes, students assume that feedback is provided by the teacher rather than by themselves. Some L2 students are dubious about the value and reliability of self-generated feedback. Without acknowledging its merits, students may find reflection and self-assessment activities challenging and uninspiring. To this end, students should be explicitly coached to practise metacognitive self-monitoring relating to the set goals and prescribed assessment criteria. By referring to the following five bulletin points, discuss which pedagogical strategy can best support the act of reflection and creation of self-generated feedback for promoting learning:

  • Teaching the genre of reflective journals to students

  • Motivating students to reflect by assigning participation grades

  • Arranging conferences to discuss student reflection

  • Giving qualitative comments on student self-assessment

  • Providing the language of reflection as input.

Feedback as Learning Evidence

In most product-based classrooms, feedback is usually used to judge student learning as a means of summative assessment. If feedback turns into a letter grade or a numerical mark, students are unable to adopt it for improving learning as no additional information about their strengths and limitations is revealed. By producing self-generated feedback in writing portfolios, students can refer back to it regularly and identify what they need to do better in their forthcoming drafts or portfolio tasks. Considering self-regulatory feedback as one form of learning evidence is likely to facilitate the metacognitive aspect of learning writing. In view of the above discussion, think about how students can further transform self-generated feedback into learning evidence for portfolio assessment, and predict possible challenges if students use self-generated feedback to improve writing. While brainstorming, you may refer to the following bulletin points:

  • Keeping self-feedback logs for review

  • Triangulating self-feedback with other feedback sources

  • Responding to self-feedback as internal dialogues

  • Comparing self-feedback with rubrics when revising

  • Stocktaking usability of self-feedback in interim drafts.

Feedback for Informing Teaching and Learning

As stated by Zimmerman and Moylan (2009: 300), the idea of self-regulation is ‘a personal feedback loop’. To close student learning gaps, students need to be trained as self-regulated learners who are enabled to review, self-monitor and evaluate their learning of writing throughout the journey of portfolio keeping. The production of internally generated feedback can inform students of ‘what to do next?’ in their writing development by adopting various learning management strategies. For teachers, they can draw on this  feedback as a reference to evaluate whether their pedagogical approaches are effective. Student internally generated feedback can also be used to align teaching and learning of writing as one form of formative assessment practices. In the following, discuss how student internally generated feedback can inform pedagogy and curriculum.

  • Micro-analysing self-feedback as programme evaluation

  • Incorporating self-regulation into current pedagogies

  • Promoting self-regulation of writing to advocate learner independence

  • Encouraging co-regulation to improve teaching effectiveness

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have argued that feedback plays a crucial role in closing student learning gaps in writing via self-regulatory practices. Situated in a portfolio-based setting, the role of feedback is described in terms of its purpose, source and levels of utilization. Drawing upon the research into educational assessment, I have unveiled the evolution of three generations of the feedback literature relating to self-regulated learning, followed by a discussion on the extent to which Zimmerman’s self-regulation model dovetails with Hamp-Lyons and Condon’s portfolio framework. Then, I have elucidated the four levels of feedback (e.g. feedback about self-regulation) used to address the three questions, namely where am I going? how am I going? and what to next? when students engage in the self-monitoring portfolio process. To exemplify methods of feedback provision and utilization, I have included two case studies to demonstrate how individual teachers utilized feedback to improve writing development. Afterwards, I discussed the pedagogical implications for promoting feedback literacy among students and teachers if feedback serves to trigger self-regulated learning. The chapter ended with one evaluation task inviting readers to critique the portfolio programmes as reported in Case Studies 5 and 6, and one discussion task underscoring the relationship between internally generated feedback and teaching and learning of writing.