Indications of change in classroom assessment: Feedback provided by teachers in implementing assessment for learning

Providing feedback is one of the ten key principles in the Assessment for Learning implementation framework we used for our professional development programme. To help student learn, teachers are expected to give timely and constructive feedback to them. Six of the twenty-seven teachers involved in our project tried out this AfL principle to support student learning in their lessons. Amongst these six teachers, three of them tried out "providing feedback" in a lesson in the first quarter of the project period and three of them tried out in the fourth quarter. Two teachers tried out "providing feedback" twice, in the third and the fourth quarters. This paper will examine the characteristics of the feedback these six teachers used in the lessons. The paper will first present the feedback identified from the eight lessons taught by the six teachers. This will be followed by a discussion on the feedback practice between those who tried out this AfL principle in the first quarter and those in the fourth quarter of the project to see if there were any differences in teachers' feedback practice in the early and later days of the professional development perjod. Further, the feedback used by the two teachers who tried out this principle twice in two consecutive quarters were examined and presented to see if changes could be identified in their feedback practice over time.