A social constructivist assessment process model: how the research literature shows us this could be best practice

By C. Rust, Berry M. O’Donovan, M. Price. 2005

392 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although assessment is acknowledged as vitally important in its effect on students’ approaches to learning, there is much criticism of assessment practice. This paper argues that if a social constructivist approach is applied to the assessment process many of the problems could be overcome. It describes what a social constructivist approach to assessment would look like and gives practical examples, from the research literature, of ways it could be implemented.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1f3dcf72555270547e20b7268e11b670e73bd1c2

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Education

Citations in the corpus

Criterion-referenced and norm-referenced assessments: compatibility and complementarity (2016, background): “The meanings of criteria can only be operationalised through the active engagement of students and teachers in co-constructing and interpreting their own understandings (O’Donovan, Price, and Rust 2004; Rust, O’Donovan, and Price 2005; Shay 2008).”
Feedback-dialogues: exploring the student perspective (2012, background): “Perhaps most significantly, Rust, O’Donovan, and Price (2005) acknowledge the role lecturers must play in facilitating student engagement with feedback, for example through one-to-one dialogue which they view as a collaborative process.”
Staff student partnership in assessment: enhancing assessment literacy through democratic practices (2017, background): “It has been asserted that assessment and feedback are the weakest links in learning and teaching and remain a major source of student dissatisfaction (Rust, O’Donovan, and Price 2005).”
The development of student feedback literacy: enabling uptake of feedback (2018, positive): “Social constructivist feedback research takes the perspective that shared and individual interpretations are developed through dialogue, sense-making and through co-construction between participants (Price, Handley, and Millar 2011; Rust, O’Donovan, and Price 2005).”
Beyond ‘doing time’: investigating the concept of student engagement with feedback (2011, background): “The concept of engagement is fundamental to contemporary socio-constructivist theories of learning which argue that individuals make sense of the world by interacting/engaging with it , where interpretations are shaped by the socio-cultural context (Rust et al , 2005 ).”
Exploring the use of peer assessment as a vehicle for closing the gap between feedback given and feedback used (2010, methodology): “The formative exercise sought to actively engage students with the marking criteria as a way of initiating them into the assessment process as suggested by Rust, O’Donovan, and Price (2005).”
A scholarly approach to solving the feedback dilemma in practice (2016, background): “…engagement and understanding through dialogue and ‘relational feedback’ It is a fundamental tenet of the social constructivist process model that knowledge is shaped and evolves through increasing participation (Rust, O’Donovan, and Price 2005), and central to that participation must be dialogue.”
Developing student competence through peer assessment: the role of feedback, self-regulation and evaluative judgement (2020, background): “Assessment therefore transforms from a unidirectional process, dominated by lecturers, to a socio-constructive and dynamic process in which lecturers and students interact (Rust et al. 2005).”
Feedback: focusing attention on engagement (2011, background): “…to explore the stages of the engagement process and, drawing primarily on socio-constructivist perspectives on feedback, as exemplified in the work of Rust, O’Donovan, and Price (2005), identify factors (for example, behavioural, cognitive and socio-cultural) that promote or prevent engagement.”