USING E-ASSESSMENT SOFTWARE TO SUPPORT FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT: A PHENOMENOGRAPHIC STUDY OF INSTRUCTORS’ EXPERIENCES

The aim of this paper is to report the results of a phenomenographic study on the different ways that college instructors experience the use of formative e-assessment in their classes. The study seeks to contribute to the field of online formative assessment by adding the conceptions that were identified as the findings of this study. As the study’s purpose is to investigate the variation in instructors’ perceptions and experiences about the use of online technologies to support formative assessment, phenomenography appeared to be the most appropriate methodology. The aim of phenomenography is to describe the variations in people’s experiences of phenomena occurring around them; in other words, its objective is to record the different ways that people perceive and understand the same event or the same aspect of the world. These different conceptions of people get grouped in categories which, after getting analyzed, formulate the typology for the study’s outcome space. It is these very categories that comprise the actual results of a phenomenographical study. Phenomenography examines the relations between people and the world around them by studying people’s experiences about the world phenomena, and not by describing the phenomena per se, neither by focusing on the psychological processes that produce the people’s experiences. In our study, four groups of college instructors teaching Information Technology / Information Systems courses at Deree - The American College of Greece were interviewed and the ways they experienced the use of educational software and online resources to support formative assessment in their classes were recorded and subsequently analyzed. The instructors’ conceptions were grouped under the following four distinct but logically related categories of descriptions (CoDs), each one exhibiting a certain degree of variation: (A): Validity / Effectiveness of formative e-assessment, (B): Reasons / Incentives for adopting formative e-assessment, (C): Association of the effectiveness of formative e-assessment with other factors, and (D): Drawbacks of formative e-assessment. The derived outcome space demonstrates the relationships between these CoDs:
(i): CoD A affects CoD B: Instructors who perceived formative e-assessment as highly effective and valid were also the ones who fully adopted it.
(ii): CoD A affects CoD C: The effectiveness of formative e-assessment may influence the overall student performance.
(iii): CoD A affects CoD D: The higher the perceived effectiveness, the higher the degree of adoption.
(iv): CoD B affects CoD C: The instructors who reported that they had fully adopted formative e-assessment could also associate its effectiveness to other factors (class level, student performance)
(v): CoD C affects CoD A: Factors such as the students’ grades and class level may influence the effectiveness of formative e-assessment.
(vi): CoD D affects CoD A: Instructors who perceived a lot of problems associated with the use of formative e-assessment did not consider it effective.
(vii): CoD D affects CoD B: Instructors who perceived no or insignificant problems associated with the use of formative e-assessment were the ones who adopted it.
All four CoDs exhibited a high degree of variation in the instructors’ conceptions, revealing how the same phenomenon can be interpreted in such different ways.