Assessment is essential to the teaching and learning processes. Assessment is not just about grading, as is commonly believed. For instructors and their students to get useful information on student achievement, student assessment must be more than just a score. This is because it should tie student performance with specific learning objectives. 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) describes feedback as a dialogue in which learners use information from different sources to enhance their work and learning strategies. 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…
