‘My work is bleeding’: exploring students’ emotional responses to first-year assignment feedback

This paper explores the emotional responses that assignment feedback can provoke in first-year undergraduates. The literature on the link between emotions and learning is well established, but surprisingly research on the relationship between emotions and feedback is still relatively scarce. This article aims to make an additional contribution to this emerging field. Semi-structured interviews with 24 first-year undergraduate students from the Humanities and Social Sciences department in a post-1992 institution were conducted. The interview narratives identified how the emotional impact of feedback was related to: prior experiences of education, the significance participants attached to the feedback received on their first assignment and how their interpretations of feedback comments were linked to beliefs about themselves as learners. The implications of these experiences on student ‘belonging’ and learning are discussed. The underlying themes that emerged from the findings are the polarised emotions of anxiety and confidence. Based on the findings, the paper concludes by making recommendations for reconceptualising feedback on first-year assignments. It suggests that a holistic assessment approach, which incorporates timely feedback indicating if students are ‘on the right lines’ with low-stakes assignments, is a practice that may both reduce anxiety and increase confidence to support students.     

Developing Expertise With Classroom Assessment in K–12 Science: Learning to Interpret Student Work. Interim Findings From a 2-Year Study

This article reports findings on growth in 3 science teachers' expertise with interpretation of student work over 1 year of participation in a program. The program was designed to strengthen classroom assessment. Using a framework for classroom assessment expertise, we analyze patterns of teacher learning, and the roles of the professional program and the quality of the assessments provided with teachers' instructional materials.     

Exploring Dialectical Tensions of Leading Volunteers in Two Community Choirs

Leaders of volunteers face different challenges than leaders of paid employees due to different motivations and reward expectations. After synthesizing previous research applying dialectical theory to group members or leaders, this study examines the dialectical tensions that leaders of volunteers experienced and the communication they used to manage those tensions as reported by both the leaders and the volunteers. A constant-comparison method was used to analyze observations and interviews of members and leaders of two community choirs. The findings suggest that leaders of volunteers face eight dialectical tensions representing three broad categories: (a) task and relationship; (b) process and outcome; and (c) internal and external. Leaders negotiated these dialectical tensions through communication strategies including use of humor and appeals to artistic spirituality. These strategies represent hybridization and dualistic discourse rather than a monologic emphasis of one course of action over another.     

Touch your toes! Developing a direct measure of behavioral regulation in early childhood

Behavioral aspects of self-regulation, including controlling and directing actions, paying attention, and remembering instructions, are critical for successful functioning in preschool and elementary school. In recent years, several direct assessments of these skills have appeared, but few studies provide complete psychometric data and many are not easy to administer. We developed a direct measure of children's behavioral regulation, the Head-to-Toes Task, and report performance of participants aged 36–78 months, including a group of Spanish-speaking children, from two different sites (N = 353; N = 92). We examined construct validity, examiner reliability, sources of variation, and associations between task scores and background characteristics. Results showed that the task was valid, reliable, and demonstrated variability in children's scores. A cross-classified hierarchical growth curve analysis indicated that girls, participants assessed in English, and higher-socioeconomic status (SES) children achieved slightly higher average scores than did boys, Spanish-speaking and lower-SES children, but effect sizes were small. Older participants achieved higher scores than did younger children, and there were no effects for site. Results suggest that the Head-to-Toes Task is an informative and easy-to-administer direct assessment of children's behavioral regulation. We discuss implications for its use in early childhood settings.     

The relationship between child behaviour problems at school entrance and teenage vocabulary acquisition: A comparison of two generations of British children born 30 years apart

Behaviour problems in early childhood have a lasting impact on cognitive development and education attainment in later adolescence and into adulthood. Here we address the relationship conduct and hyperactivity problems at school entrance, and vocabulary acquisition in adolescence. We compare performance in identical assessments across two generations of British children born 30 years apart in 1970 (n = 15,676) and 2000/2 (n = 16,628) and find that both conduct and hyperactivity problems have a negative association with later vocabulary in both generations. We take advantage of rich longitudinal birth cohort data and establish that these relationships hold once family socioeconomic status and a child’s personal characteristics and earlier vocabulary acquisition are taken into account. We also find that teenagers today achieved substantively lower scores in the vocabulary assessment compared to their counterparts born 30 years earlier, and that this holds across all categories within each of the family and individual characteristics considered in this article. As vocabulary and language skills are key prerequisites for wider learning, we discuss implications the findings have for education policies.