Lecturers’ practices and their students’ perceptions of the formative

To the best of my knowledge, few studies appear to have been conducted which examine both the lecturers’ practices of conducting general assessment in higher education contexts and the students’ reactions towards their lecturers’ assessment.

An empirical study by Collins (2010) in a private Turkish university revealed two divergent views of EMI lecturers regarding summative assessment. One group of lecturers mentioned that they were content lecturers and they were more concerned about assessing the students’ knowledge rather than their English language abilities. However, another group of content lecturers felt that they were also responsible for assessing the students’ English language

proficiency, and they would deduct marks if students made errors in language. The students’ perceptions in the 2010 study were that they were unable to express their ideas and content knowledge fluently, and thus they were reluctant

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to write. However, the students in this study did not clearly mention their perceptions about being assessed in English.

Aguilara and Rodrígueza (2012) conducted a study on the perceptions of engineering lecturers and their postgraduate students about EMI in a Spanish university. In a small section of the study that examined the lecturers’

perceptions of assessment in English, the lecturers admitted that they did not use English to assess students in the summative assessment. Two reasons contributed to their reluctance to use English. The first was due to the lecturers’ expressed lack of confidence in assessing the English language, while the second was the perception that the assessment of content was more important than that of the English language. The students, on the other hand, did not really indicate their responses towards the lecturers’ decision not to use English in the assessment. However, students were unhappy with the lecturers’ poor English proficiency during the lectures, and this affected the students’ understanding of the content. Students were also unhappy with the lecturers’ decision to not use code switching in class, but they were happy to acquire English technical content-specific vocabulary in class.

In the Malaysian public and private tertiary education context, the assessment conducted is based on the Malaysian Quality Assurance (MQA) and the Ministry of Higher Education’s general outline of conducting assessment. The policies stated that the universities are required to design programmes which clearly outline and measure the learning outcomes and that the assessment is designed in parallel with the intended learning outcomes (Tunku et al., 2014). Nevertheless, these stated policies have never been fully implemented, as the lecturers in both the public and private Malaysian universities tend not to have clear directions about how to conduct assessment, as reported by Zubairi, Sarudin and Nordin (2008). The methods of conducting assessment also varied from one university to another. Even within a single university context, some lecturers are given the flexibility to conduct their own assessment, while others are subjected to the assessment requirements of their partner universities (Mohamad, 1999).

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Limited studies have been conducted on the lecturers’ practice of assessment in the Malaysian tertiary context where EMI is used (Tunku et al., 2014), with the exception of Chan and Sidhu (2013), Lee et al.(2010), Mohamad (1999), Tunku et al. (2014) and Zubairi et al. (2008).

The findings of Mohamad’s (1999) study suggested that the Malaysian private university lecturers from the social sciences and education were exposed to, and applied, the theories of assessment more than their colleagues from the other disciplines in an EMI context. Overall, the lecturers’ concerns about validating the grades outweighed the procedures of validating the test. The lecturers’ emphasis on validating grades could have been influenced by the policies set out by the university, where a form of review or moderation was conducted to verify the grades provided. The lecturers were required to submit the

assessment with the criteria for vetting purposes. Despite the policies to assist them in the process of assessment, the lecturers’ practices of providing

assessment did not match the best practices suggested in the previous studies on assessment. It was suggested that perhaps the institution’s existing training on assessment was still inadequate to assist lecturers (Mohamad, 1999).

The lecturers’ failure to conduct formative assessment was also revealed in Zubairi et al.’s (2008) research. In that particular study, lecturers in one of the public Malaysian universities that used both EMI and Arabic as a medium of instruction preferred traditional methods of using multiple-choice questions or essay questions. More recent assessment methods – for instance, the use of portfolio and demonstrations – were not highly favoured or practiced by the lecturers. Chan and Sidhu (2013), from Education Department of a public Malaysian university, advocated the use of online assessment to assist lecturers in their formative assessment process.

In another study, Tunku Ahmad et al. (2014) conducted a national study of 543 lecturers from 33 higher learning institutions in Malaysia, both from the public and private universities, to analyse their self-reporting practices in formative assessment. In the study, the majority of the participants were from applied science and technology disciplines, and from the social sciences and humanities. The study suggested that the lecturers used the assessment to

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convey student performance using both written and oral feedback. The assessment methods varied from assessing group participation to alternative methods, such as, demonstration and observation. Students’ effort,

attentiveness, and language proficiency were taken into consideration by the lecturers when grading work. The study also indicated that the Malaysian lecturers did not have a clear understanding of the functions of formative assessment and they did not incorporate feed-forward in assisting students’ learning. Thus, the researchers suggested that more training on formative assessment ought to be provided to lecturers. None of the studies stated above (Chan & Sidhu, 2013; Mohamad, 1999; Tunku Ahmad et al., 2014; Zubairi et al., 2008) incorporated students’ perceptions of their lecturers’ assessment.

Utaberta et al. (2012) compared their study of 23 Malaysian undergraduates studying architecture in a Malaysian public university with a survey done by Salama and El-Attar (2010), on Egyptian students studying in an Egyptian university, showing the differences and similarities in student preferences between several assessment processes. The findings suggest that the majority of the students from both countries felt that the assessment criteria were unclear and outdated, and that the assessment procedures ought to have been changed and adapted to the students’ learning needs and current pedagogic trends.

In another study, Utaberta and Hassanpour (2012) examined the effectiveness of a criteria-based assessment model, which was developed by the researchers in a public university for an undergraduate architecture course. The finding suggested that although some lecturers may have marked according to the criteria provided, the lecturers chose to withhold the criteria from the students. Utaberta and Hassanpour (2012) suggested that perhaps the criteria should be made known to the students. It is also essential to clarify the assessors’ expectations and apply the same criteria to all students, in order to be fair.

However, Lee et al. (2010) conducted a small-scale study on students majoring in English language studies, to examine their perceptions of the various

assessments conducted by their English lecturers in a public university. The findings suggested that the university lecturers did not provide much feedback on students’ formative and summative assessment, yet students were happy to

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receive only the grades provided by their lecturers, passively accepting the grades and not requiring further feedback. Students perceived their status as submissive learners, while the lecturer was perceived as an authoritative person, especially in grading assessments. Grades were perceived by students as a measurement of the knowledge they had acquired, rather than a tool to assist them in their subsequent learning. The researchers implied that the students’ views of assessment were not taken into consideration in higher education, so that they were often at a disadvantage, even though they were clients who were paying for their own education.