Supporting Students’ Learning: From Teacher Regulation to Co-Regulation

Abstract

Even though there is widespread acceptance that student interaction with peers could make a strong contribution to learning, there is evidence that teachers have trouble adopting formative assessment strategies that actively involve students. They often see activities like peer feedback as less efficient than direct instruction and are frustrated by the results of such co-regulated activities. They are, however, also disappointed with how students generally respond to teacher feedback which may be an indicator of problems either with the quality of the feedback or with the students’ capacity to regulate their own learning. The qualitative multiple case study research presented in this chapter was designed to understand what formative assessment decisions teachers make to support learning and to help them move progressively from teacher-focused to student-centered action. The research is focused on language arts, more specifically on writing, and it is divided into three phases. At each phase, teachers select and share texts produced by their students with a colleague and make individual and joint assessment decisions to support student learning. The first phase of the research is designed to understand the assessment decisions teachers are initially making to support learning. Each of the following phases begins with an intervention in order to determine its impact on teachers’ assessment decisions. Findings reveal that changes in formative assessment practice do occur as a result of discussions with the colleague and the interventions, however, they occur unequally among teachers and are influenced by their individual representations of what formative assessment involves in practice.