An analysis on the provision of feedback in the school-based assessment of the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE) Examinations for English language: A deviation between the benign curriculum guidelines and the reality?

Yin Hong Carlos CHOW

Research output: ThesisHonours Projects (HP)

Abstract

The pedagogical merits of feedback have long been well-articulated in the scholastic field. According to Hattie and Timperley (2007), feedback is a key to driving students’ continuous improvement in learning, providing directions to prompt learners to perform constant reflections and evaluations throughout their learning processes. This research, therefore, sets its sights on examining the provision of this helpful learning construct in an under-studied context, i.e. the English School-based Assessment (SBA) of the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE) Examinations, an assessment that integrates both summative and formative functions as to report students’ attainment of English in their HKDSE exam while also to guide students to achieve continuous improvements, reflections and evaluations throughout the assessment preparation practices (Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority, 2021). Synthesizing with the quantitative and qualitative findings, this research employs an integrative approach to account for the factors attributing to and the solutions coping with the four major deviations between the curriculum recommendations and the realities found. They are namely the paucity of timeliness in the teachers’ feedback provision, the inability of helping students to cultivate an active engagement with the feedback, the inability of cultivating students’ metacognition with the feedback and a failed capacity to attend to students’ socio-affective needs with the feedback. At the end, this paper calls for members of the education sector, ranging from the examination authority, schools and frontline teachers, to demonstrate concerted efforts to enhance SBA assessors’ acquaintance with the assessment guidelines and to make adaptations to the pedagogical practices so as to enable students to better harness the merits of feedback to drive continuous improvement in learning.
Original languageEnglish
QualificationBachelor of Education (Honours)
Supervisors/Advisors
  • YAN, Zi 晏子, Supervisor
Publication statusPublished - 2022

Keywords

  • Honours Project (HP)
  • Bachelor of Education (Honours) (English Language) (Five-year Full-time)
  • Programme code: A5B059
  • Course code: TLS4029

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