Sustainable assessment and feedback literacy in higher education. Complexities and dilemmas of an innovative teaching experience

Abstract

Gaining assessment and research skills is crucial to the continuous development of the professionalism of future teachers. To this aim, the most suitable framework is that of sustainable assessment, which may respond both to the learning needs of pre-service teachers and their needs to come in the workplace. To facilitate the acquisition of such skills, students attending the degree course in primary teacher education have been proposed to realize an authentic task together with two specific scaffolding actions: an Assessment as Learning and a feedback literacy path. The results of the mixed-method evaluation research, which could be contextualized in the perspective of the educational assessment and aimed at collecting and understanding the students’ perceptions regarding the teaching approach, showed an appreciation for the proposal as a whole. On the one hand, the experimentation intercepted the students’ desire to deepen the dimension of the assessment during their studies. On the other hand, a dilemma arose – which deserves to
be further investigated – regarding the complexity of the challenging teaching approach aimed at stimulating students’ learning, especially in higher education.