FEEDBACK AND ASSESSMENT PRACTICE IN SICILIAN SECONDARY SCHOOL

Abstract

Teachers’ evaluative competence is one of the pivots of the teaching action because it represents a potential spring for the promotion of learning, autonomy, and educational success of each pupil. Feedback offers the opportunity to enhance the singularity of each student's paths by framing communicative interactions which guide teachers’ evaluative choices by diversifying linguistic registers and choices of communication tools functional to educational success. Since its debut, [3]; [4]; [5], formative evaluation has changed the course of the assessment & evaluative practice. There followed the consolidation of learning through the development of self-regulation, autonomy, reflexivity of pupils and the remodelling of the learning environments. In this context, “feedback” appears as a critical learning process shaped by factors such as school culture, curriculum, educational style, and school mission [6] and contributes significantly to the quality of the student experience [8] as well as to that of the teaching practice [9]; [24]. Hence, the need to train teachers in a strategic and conscious use of feedback, within a reticular and continuous communication perspective [7]. The present paper illustrates the results of a research process, implemented with 385 secondary school teachers from the province of Caltanissetta, Sicily, in the academic year 2020/2021. Through the research process, we aimed at increasing teachers' evaluative competence as a communicative and teaching one centred on feedback. It was hypothesized that the experimental action, centred on Castoldi’s [18] (2016) trifocal model of skills assessment, and used during the specially designed workshop hours, would significantly improve, in the teaching / learning process of the teachers involved, the ability to evaluate and critically re-elaborate one's work; manage the skills assessment process; provide students with truly educational feedback; reflect on the communication process during the feedback; describe and use different communication codes, verbal and non-verbal during the feedback. To evaluate the acquisition of assessment skills, the following initial and final survey tools were used: 1) a questionnaire for the assessment of evaluative competence (pre / post-test); 2) a check list [19] for the measurement of communicative-teaching competence (pre / post-test); 3) three focus group sessions. The research methodology used was both quantitative and qualitative. The research path has foreseen three actions: the first aimed at designing and elaborating activities for the implementation of the competences in question; the second action was characterized by the introduction of the experimental factor; the third action saw the experimentation with 190 first grade secondary school teachers and 195 second grade secondary school teachers. The research process took place in the period between November 2020 and March 2021 (45 workshop activity hours). The data collected from the research process confirm that evaluation in the school environment represents a complex moment both from the point of view of the planning and from that of teachers' interventions. Today, more than ever, it is necessary to rethink assessment as a structural component of teaching.