Article appearing in Shiken 23.1 (June 2019) pp. 45-49.
Author: James Dean Brown
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
Question:
In the latest issue of the Journal of Asia TEFL [see Brown, 2019], you wrote an article about the importance of assessment feedback. While it was informative, your article left me wondering if there is any research supporting the usefulness of assessment feedback and where I can learn more about such feedback.
Answer:
The article you referred to was aimed at language teachers across Asia. To answer your questions here, I will provide information and resources that testers and language researchers in Japan might find useful for further understanding and/or investigating the issue of feedback in language assessment. To those ends, I will address the following questions:
- How can we define feedback and specifically assessment feedback?
- What does the literature say about the effectiveness and usefulness of assessment feedback?
- What resources are available for learning more about feedback and assessment feedback?