ACTION RESEARCH II
Student Motivation in Completing Formative Work By Gray Macklin, High School Vice Principal and Sunwoo Lee, 10th grade student. Seoul International School Rationale Formative assessments and assignments were constructed for the definite purposes of guiding students through the learning process and preparing students to demonstrate what they have learned. Such materials will only be beneficial if students take it seriously as practice. Moreover, summative work is not intended to rank students based on grades, but to serve as motivation for students to learn the topics completely. Students often value more efficient methods of obtaining a higher grade, such as simply memorizing class notes word-by-word, than focusing strictly on learning and skill improvement regardless of the grade. Students will not feel a different sense of accomplishment when they learn the material to get a better outcome compared to when they acquire test-taking skills to perform well. The focus of this research began with this student author’s research for a viewpoint piece in the school paper linking effort in daily participation in PE class and performance on graded fitness tests. The viewpoint expressed was in response to students who wanted to get the maximum grade outcome with the bare minimum input. We realized that this lack of motivation is not only the case for PE, but also for other subjects and wondered what we could learn about student motivation academic practice. A deeper understanding of student motivation to complete formative work could be used as a starting point to practices that promote student investment in formative work. Introduction Formative assessment has been an increasingly important component of education reform over the past several decades. Recently the emphasis has been specifically on the role of formative assessment in assigning student grades. While most definitions of formative assessment emphasize their role in informing teacher and student understanding of progress toward a specific academic goal, those that include a reference to grades often note that formative work is ungraded. This is due in large part to the entrance of non-achievement factors like promptness and neatness finding their way into grades, effectively clouding or blurring what the final grade actually means in terms of learning (Marzano, 2000 & Guskey, 2007). Popham (2008) advocated for the development of learning progressions that incorporated both formative and summative assessment; there is consensus that students require multiple opportunities to improve (Crockett & Churches, 2017). There is also consensus that the emphasis on corrective feedback is the primary value of formative assessment (Frey & Fischer, 2011) The challenge comes when teachers are expected to use multiple data points to determine an accurate grade (Marzano, 2006) but are also expected to exclude all formative work from the list of that data. While Marzano (2000) addresses the under-reporting of the most current ability when formative work is scored in an average, Greenstein (2010) notes that some scoring of formative assessment allows for teachers to indicate learning among students who struggle with more traditional forms of assessment. Standards based grading may solve many of these complications
and is strongly supported by Marzano, Guskey, Schimmer, and others, but that does not solve the problem for schools that are on traditional scales (0-100, 4.0, etc.). There is extensive literature on the importance of formative work and on best assessment practices, but there is little field work on motivating high performing students in Asia to complete formative work that is ungraded. Methodology For this study the authors chose a mixed methods approach that employed both survey responses and focus group discussion. The survey was designed by first having conversations with students about their thinking about formative work. This was done by the student author so that students would feel more comfortable in talking about school as well as identify familiar language that could be used in the survey. Once the survey questions were written they were reviewed by high school faculty for feedback. The finalized survey was sent via Google forms to student email accounts and left open for 10 days. During the response window, two additional emails were sent to students thanking students for their participation and reminding them that their input was valuable in shifting how the school administration and faculty approach formative work. From the responses, the authors then identified key questions that required more detailed explanation to carry out in small focus group discussions. The small groups were intended to be made up of 6 randomly selected students from each grade level, balanced for gender representation. Normally these would have been held during a lunch period, but due to the school closure these were held in Google Meet sessions hosted by the student author and observed by the faculty author. Only two students agreed to an additional online interview, which was to be expected considering the amount of time students have been spending in e-learning classrooms. The conclusions and recommendations came from a synthesis of survey responses and discussion responses. Data: Of the possible 290 respondents, 115 students submitted responses to the survey. Sent to students in grades 9 to 11, 39.1%, 31.3%, and 29.6% of responses came from those grades respectively representing a good balance of representation across the different grades surveyed. 54.8% of the respondents were female and 45.2% were male, also indicating that the responses represent a balance between genders. 56.5% of the respondents identified as having moderately high to high motivation to complete formative work with the remaining 43.5% identifying as having moderate to low motivation. The lowest response was 2.6% of students identified as having low motivation. The first substantive question regarding the subject area students had the most difficulty finding motivation to complete revealed that 66% of students identified English and Math with 34.8% and 31.3% respectively. There was a significant drop-off with Science, World Language, and Fall 2020 Issue 35
