Assessment is an important part of the learning and teaching process. Assessment is not just about grading, as is commonly believed. To provide instructors and students with useful information about student achievement it is important to understand that assessment is more complex than a simple grade. It should be able to link student performance to a specific learning objective. In higher educational institutions, the use of summative assessments to assign grades and little to no feedback prior to the completion of a course has become a common practice.
The value of providing student feedback is immense. Carless (2015) defines feedback as a dialogic approach in which students make sense of the information they receive and then use it to improve their learning or work. The purpose of feedback is to enable students to effectively change the quality of their work: “Feedback is a process whereby learners obtain information about their work in order to appreciate the similarities and differences between the appropriate standards for any given work, and the qualities of the work itself, in order to generate…
