One of the big advantages of the e-learning environment and opportunities it provides with is such an essential leaning enhancing tool as a feedback. There is a big pool of feedback options educators could use in order to improve students’ performance.

In the recent video for the e-learning class the term “Recursive feedback” was introduced. Recursive feedback - feedback whose value is weighted by feedback on feedback, and ratings that are moderated by inter-rater reliability calculations (Kalantzis, Cope, 2015).

For years the most common way feedback came in is a form of a summative assessment test results. These results would demonstrate the mastery of the curriculum learned by the student. Even though this data is not entirely invaluable, summative assessment is separated from learning and has little to do in an immediate sense to further learning. Today, in the era of social knowledge technologies, no learning environment should be without always-available feedback mechanisms. Then, when it comes to summative assessment we can use collected data from the formative assessments to represent the retrospective view of students progress (Kalantzis, Cope, 2015).

Formative assessment is dedicated to improvement in a process of learning. Technology allows us to capture fine-grained data about what individuals do as they interact with their environments, producing an “ocean” of data that, if used correctly, can give us a new view of how learners progress in acquiring knowledge, skills, and attributes (Kalantzis, Cope, 2015). Therefore, tasks are focused on capturing the content surrounding behavior, collecting the evidence about student’s behavior, and the exploration of the way the learner is performing a task, not the final result (Mislevy et al., 2012; Rupp et al., 2012). The important part about formative assessment is that it can deliver timely data about what students understand and a possible misconception. Since students aren’t always aware of whether or not the material was well-comprehended, the teacher’s responsibility is to find a way to determine it.

There are many different ways to implement the techniques of formative assessment into the classroom, these include:

Ongoing assessments;

Reviews;
Observations in a classroom;
Discussion with students;
Examination of writing assignments etc (Fisher, Frey, 2014).

Such techniques if used with intention allow educators to come up with a more effective instruction and facilitate learning process. They inform teaching by allowing the teacher to continuously gather information on students thinking and learning to make data-informed decisions to plan for or adjust instructional activities, monitor the pace of instruction, identify potential misconceptions that can be barriers as well as springboards for learning, and spend more time on ideas that students struggle with.

Mary Kalantzis, Bill Cope (2015) Learning and New Media

Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey (2014) Checking for understanding: formative assessment techniques for your classroom.

Page Keeley ( 2016 ) Science Formative Assessment, Volume 1: 75 Practical Strategies for Linking Assessmet, Instruction and Learning

Robert J Mislevy, Geneva Haertel, Michelle Riconscente, Daisy Wise Rutstein, Cindy Ziker (2017) Assessing Model-Based Reasoning using Evidence- Centered Design: A Suite of Research Based design patterns