The Approaches and Obstacles to Providing Feedback to Students in the Descriptive Assessment Program

The purpose of this study was to identify the approaches and obstacles to giving effective feedback to the students in the descriptive-quantitative assessment program. For this purpose, 351 primary school teachers were selected from Alborz province (Iran) using stratified sampling. The data were collected through a researcher-made questionnaire that included 42 items and the content validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by experienced faculty members. The questionnaire reliability of 0. 8 was obtained through Cronbach's alpha. The results of this study showed that the feedbacks provided in the descriptive assessment system faced operational challenges and backgroundobstacles. The operational challenges included ranking of the students and expression ranking in the classroom, providing unsuitable feedback in terms of structure and content, providing feedback ratings rather than process-oriented feedback, lack of offering motivational feedback and strategic feedback to the weaker students. And background obstacles included ineffective educational courses held with the purpose of increasing the capacity of teachers in providing descriptive feedback, the high density of students in classrooms, low levels of teacher's awareness about feedback, the great number of teachers who adhered to their positive attitudes toward the main components of the traditional assessment system. Finally, the researcher presented recommendations for improving the conditions.