Meta-Analysis of the Findings on the Effects of Descriptive Evaluation on Learning Outcomes

Changing the way that students’ learning is evaluated to what is called descriptive evaluation during the past decade has been the focus of many studies with conflicting results. To clarify the picture and determine the true impact of this type of evaluation on cognitive, affective, and behavioral learning, 52 studies were chosen for meta-analysis from among all such studies accessible. Following a sensitivity analysis, 21 asymmetric effect sizes, from among 135 identified, were eliminated and the combined effect size for the remaining 114 in both fixed and randomized models was assessed to be 0.558 and 0.505, respectively. The significance of both effect sizes is indicative of moderate effectiveness of descriptive evaluation in all three dimensions of learning, with the cognitive dimension being most affected, while the effect on affective learning is the least. Further analyses of variance showed significant difference between the effect sizes on different learning outcomes.