Structural Relationships of Elementary School Students’ Perception of Formative Feedback, Belief of Intelligence, Attitude Towards Assessment, Behavioral Intention, and Classroom Engagement

Abstract

The aims of this study was to explore the structural relationships among students’ attitudes toward assessment(SATA), the incremental belief of intelligence, the perceived teachers’ formative feedback, behavioral intention, and classroom engagement in either formative or summative assessment situations. In the study the multi-level SEM approach was used to identify the structural relationships among the SATA and its related variables using Mplus. The findings revealed that incremental belief of intelligence and formative feedback had a statistically significant positive effect on expectancy and value and an indirect effect on learners’ participation through value, positive affect, and behavioral intention. Specifically, formative feedback had a positive direct effect on behavioral intention and learners’ participation. The educational implications based on the results of this study are as follows. First, teachers’ formative feedback and students’ incremental beliefs of intelligence are variables with a positive influence on SATA. Second, students ascribe a greater value to and have better expectations from summative assessment rather than formative assessment. They consider summative assessment results to be more important. Although the mean of value and expectation in formative assessment was low, value showed the greatest positive effect on positive affect while expectation reduced negative affect in formative assessment. Therefore, to help improve students’ learning, the role of formative assessment is important. There is a need to emphasize that teachers should use student-centered assessment to consider students’ individual differences in learning and enhance students’ learning by providing formative feedback.