Formative Assessment:Students’ attitudes and preferences in Swedish Upper Secondary School

For teachers, being able to provide feedback that learners can act upon is paramount for making learning how to write possible. A questionnaire was sent out to students in Swedish Upper Secondary School. The intent was to identify how students perceive feedback, as well as how they react and interpret the feedback they receive on written texts. The results are then used in a discussion that aims to draw attention to the potential implications that feedback may have on students’ motivation to write. In this study, Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick’s seven principles for feedback serve as a measurement for what constitutes good feedback. The results suggest that when a certain form of feedback is not commonly used by teachers or is used differently by different teachers, then the feedback becomes difficult to interpret for students. The respondents consider themselves regular recipients of feedback but struggle with interpreting feedback when there are variations in teachers’ practices in applying feedback