Assessment is for learning: supporting feedback

This paper describes an action research, school situated project conducted with partnership funding from Learning and Teaching Scotland, Scottish Qualifications Authority and Becta, the UK government's agency for communications technology in education. Based on e-scape (e-solutions for creative assessment in portfolio environments), developed by Goldsmiths, University of London, the Scottish project focussed on integrating innovative methods of capturing evidence of creative performance with providing formative feedback to learners. Classroom trials were conducted with Primary 7 through to Secondary 3 learners (10-15 year olds) in 2 different local education authorities. Learner and teacher thoughts were recorded through blogs, e-forums and interviews; the authored design challenges were shared through the web-based e-scape authoring system and e-folios reviewed by participant teachers and researchers. This paper provides a summary of the reactions and responses from teacher practitioner, learner and researcher perspectives based on their experiences and the results of the classroom trials. It discusses the potential contribution in terms of supporting learning, teaching and assessment within the framework of Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence (2004) Technologies (2009) learning area. It is hoped that e-scape scotland supports pedagogies which enable the capture of creative thinking in real time for authentic and formative assessment and addresses some of the issues for classroom practice and practitioners.