Abstract:

The documents regulating education in Lithuania delegate an important role to education, i.e. the increase of the state’s welfare, which will form preconditions for education of a progressive and independent person (National Strategy for Education 2013-2022). Improvement of the quality of education remains one of the national policy goals (Concept of Good School, 2015) seeking to make preconditions for improvement of the level of school quality, to indicate proper directions and guidelines. In their scholarly works, researchers (Khamis, Selamat, 2019; Nottingham, Nottingham, 2017; Stone, 2015) investigate various pedagogical factors which contribute to the seeking for better results, including feedback. It is provided as one of the instruments helping form the manifestation of result-oriented learning paradigm in educational practice (Gielen De Wever, 2015); it is focused on improvement of the job done and motivation of a school student for a well done job (Hattie, 2009; Hattie, 2012), continuous perfection of a learner as well as evaluation and assessment based on clear criteria, by precisely defining the summative and formative assessment (Angelo, Cross, 2012). Already in 2015, strategic documents regulating education in Lithuania established that systematic and learning success-directed feedback was being provided in the process of (self-) education. There is an intention to direct the evaluation of attainments not only towards educational programme’s goals but also to regard student’s learning pace, developmental characteristics which would prevent conditioning improper assumption for evaluation of student’s personal progress. Despite that, the investigation carried out by the National Agency for School Evaluation (Quality of general education activities, 2015) demonstrated that majority of Lithuanian schools were not able to properly evaluate students’ progress; usually, the progress was associated with students’ attainments and outcome-directed meeting of students’ needs. It is stated that schools usually analyse only statistical data of student’s attainments because it is much easier, they lack consistent monitoring of student’s individual progress. It can be stated that strategic documents at the national level establish the directions which create conditions for seeking school students’ higher learning outcomes; however, there is lack of investigations focused on practical manifestation (in this case, manifestation of feedback in the education process) of directions established in documents. The current research aimed at analysing manifestation of feedback in the process of education dealing with strategic documents of local gymnasiums regulating assessment and evaluation of students’ achievements and progress.

The method of content analysis of documents was chosen for the collection of the data. On the basis of this method the strategic documents of general education schools which regulate the procedure of assessing achievements and progress of the pupils were analyzed. 120 Lithuanian schools were randomly included into the study (2 schools from each of the 60 municipalities).
The emphasised directions of the analysis are related to the change of the concept of feedback, reconstructions of the organisation of the education process and the sustainability stance in the system of (self-) evaluation and (self-) assessment.

Keywords:

Feedback, response, evaluation and assessment.