The Interplay Between Student Evaluation and Instruction: Grading and Feedback in Mathematics Classrooms

Abstract

Teachers’ practices of student evaluation can be considered crucial to the implementation of embedded assessment systems. This article reports on two studies investigating these practices in detail. The first study examines teacher judgments about student achievement in terms of the grades awarded. It examines whether the grades awarded reflect two dimensions of students’ achievement as well as learning behavior. It also explores whether teachers’ grading is aligned with their instruction. In the second study, we analyze how teacher evaluation affects students’ subsequent learning processes. This study utilizes feedback given to students by the teacher within classroom interaction as an indicator for student evaluation, and investigates the impact of two types of feedback, evaluative and informational, on student learning and motivation. The results of Study 1 show that both the dimensions of student achievement as well as involvement were found to contribute substantially to students’ grades. Moreover, these contributions depended on teacher beliefs and instructional quality. The findings of Study 2 show that positive evaluative feedback in the classroom was associated with increased intrinsic motivation, whereas negative evaluative feedback was not related to motivation. Informational feedback was shown to foster motivation via emotional experience and cognitive processing. None of the feedback types examined had a significant impact on students’ achievement development. Finally, implications of the two studies for the implementation of embedded classroom assessment and the investigation of its effects are discussed.