Conferencing

Having finished teaching ENG 2213 and ENG 3280, I started to give consultations to individual students or a group of students by appointment.

In these two weeks, I met a lot of them who either prepared questions about their drafted assignments or intended to clear any misunderstandings of some key concepts in the modules. That's a good sign. Up to this point, most students asked me how they could design an effective formative assessment task to be carried out in the ESL classroom (which is part of the assessment requirements of the module ENG 3280 and some actually required me to define the formative assessment task conceptually before they planned their assessment strategies for use.

'Formative assessment is not like its summative counterpart in terms of form and mode of delivery. Students, however, do not need to pick up a pen and fill out correct answers on a quiz paper under timed conditions when performing formative assessment. Instead, it takes place minute by minute and hour by hour and is part of teaching and learning process. For instance, the conference between you and me is a kind of formative assessment since I give you verbal feedback which may result in improvement being made in the next step of your learning.' I replied.

Some of my students fully understood this analogy but some still interpreted formative assessment from the perspectives of psychometric assessment paradigm, that is, formative assessment is a tool to judge students rather than to help them improve.

To round up our meetings, I usually said, 'Keep up with your reading and call me if you have further questions about your assignment.'