Students’ critical incidents of fairness in classroom assessment: an empirical study

Abstract

Conceptualizing fairness through social psychology theory has recently been called for in classroom assessment (CA) literature. This study used two open-ended questionnaires to explore university students' critical incidents of fairness and unfairness and their affective and behavioral reactions to experiences of un/fairness. The findings showed that students' perceptions of CA fairness were comprised of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice principles. Collectively, students considered the distribution of outcomes, the procedures for outcome distributions, the interpersonal relationships, and the communication procedures in conceptualizing fairness. Students also reported positive feelings such as happiness, satisfaction, feeling valued, and hopefulness when describing fair incidents, while they tended to report negative feelings such as anger, upset, disappointment, and embarrassment as responses to unfair incidents. Students also reported increased classroom engagement and greater adaptation in responses to fairness incidents, while they reported class disengagement, inaction, and dissent as responses to unfair incidents. Building on these empirical findings, a more comprehensive conceptualization of fairness in CA contexts is proposed.

A phenomenographic study on language assessment literacy: hearing from Iranian university teachers

“…This could be explained by the point when tests are perceived as unfair by students, they may make students feel angry, confused, powerless, embarrassed, and frustrated (Buttner, 2004;Chory et al, 2017;Horan et al, 2010). Another possible explanation could be students' perceptions of un/fairness of testing practices which may cause students to show positive and negative affective reactions, as well as behavioral responses (Rasooli et al, 2019). Additionally, in alignment with Fan et al (2020), the study's results can be discussed from this perspective that if assessment practices do not consider the ethical requirements, the decisions taken based on test results may not be very accurate.…”

EFL/ESL Students' Perceptions of Distributive, Procedural, and Interactional Justice: The Impact of Positive Teacher-Student Relation

“…Procedural justice refers to the understanding of fairness in terms of utilized measures and policies so as to make allocation decisions. This justice is viewed to be kept when the measures are judged to be fair such as “bias dominance principle,” recognized on satisfactory and accurate information such as “accuracy principle,” engaged regularly across time and individuals such as “consistency principle,” adaptable such as “correctability principle,” considering all individuals' concerns who are engaged such as “voice principle,” resting on the predominant ethical and moral values such as “ethicality principle,” enacted clearly and with clarity such as “transparency principle,” and are rational “reasonableness principle” (Leventhal, 1980 ; Kazemi and Törnblom, 2008 ; Rasooli et al, 2019 ).…”

“…Interactional justice, the third classification of organizational justice, relates to the understanding of fairness in conveying information and interpersonal relationships when individuals perceive to be in a friendly atmosphere such as “caring principle,” behaved reverentially such as respect principle, and with dignity such as “propriety principle,” and when information is transferred to them in an appropriate manner such as “timeliness principle,” sincerely such as “truthfulness principle,” and according to sufficient and rational clarifications such as “adequacy/justification principle,” (Greenberg, 1993 ; Colquitt, 2001 ; Rasooli et al, 2019 ). Out of the three dimensions, distributive justice is the most crucially important from teacher's point of view which can be seen in different forms, from grading, giving feedback to praising, and providing students with opportunities (Ciuladien and Račelyte, 2016 ).…”

Chinese EFL Students' Perceptions of Classroom Justice: The Impact of Teachers' Caring and Immediacy

“…Procedural justice refers to the understanding of fairness in terms of utilized measures and policies so as to make allocation decisions. This justice is perceived to be kept when the measures are judged to be fair such as “bias dominance principal,” recognized on satisfactory and accurate information such as “accuracy principle,” engaged regularly across time and individuals such as “consistency principle,” adaptable such as “correctability principle,” considering all individuals' concerns who are engaged such as “voice principle,” resting on the predominant ethical and moral values such as “ethicality principle”, enacted clearly and with clarity such as “transparency principle,” and are rational “reasonableness principle” (Leventhal, 1980 ; Kazemi and Törnblom, 2008 ; Rasooli et al, 2019 ). Interactional and procedural fairness are inspected in the instructive contexts as well.…”

“…Interactional justice that is the third classification of organizational justice, pertains to the understanding of fairness in conveying information and interpersonal relationships, when individuals perceive to be in a friendly atmosphere such as “caring principle,” behaved reverentially such as respect principle, and with dignity such as “propriety principle,” and when information is transferred to them in an appropriate manner such as “timeliness principle,” sincerely such as “truthfulness principle,” and according to sufficient and rational clarifications such as “adequacy/justification principle” (Greenberg, 1993 ; Colquitt, 2001 ; Rasooli et al, 2019 ). Out of the three dimensions, distributive justice was the one which was said to be the most crucially important from the teacher's point of view which can be seen in different forms, from grading, giving feedback to praising and providing students with opportunities.…”