Formative assessment in online teaching and learning during the first COVID-19 Malta lockdown – Educators’ voices, types of practices and users

Abstract

School closure in March 2020 necessitated a rethinking of the modus operandi in compulsory education as the unpreparedness for the first closure was a crisis management situation due to the huge lacuna in class educators’ and school leaders’ training. Nonetheless, educators tried what they knew best – transporting the traditional classroom approaches online. Understandably, their world has been shaken and with their only safety net being their class comfort zone of practice, this was expected. With the lack of training, the use of formative assessment (FA) within such modality has declined significantly. Further analysis into this decline reveals the use of two types of practices – teacher centredness (one-way traffic) in asynchronous sessions, and shared participation between the teacher and the student (two way traffic) in real time encounters, and four types of users – regressive, consistent, progressive and unwavering/resistors.