Developing collaboration culture together with homes is essential at school in most European countries. School-family partnerships include the ways schools and parents work together to support pupils’ learning, development and well-being. Positive relationship between school and home is especially important in terms of assessment. So far, collaboration between school and home has been focusing on informing parents about assessment of learning through discussions and reports during the school year, which focus mainly on how the pupil has progressed and learned at school. Reciprocal communication between school and home requires that assessment is conducted throughout the learning processes. Learning goals and assessment criteria should be transparent for pupils and parents already during the teaching and learning processes. Since the teacher cannot observe and inform everything about a pupil’s learning to parents, there is a need to find new ways to enhance collaboration with homes.  

In this poster presentation we introduce a research project, which aims at seeking new and useful practices to enhance collaboration between school and home. The project is funded by Finnish National Agency for Education, EDUFI. It started at the beginning of August 2018 and will end in December 2019. The focus in this research is the early years of primary education. 

In order to enhance collaboration between school and home this research project seeks to develop assessment for learning cultures so that emphasis is continuous assessment instead of end of school year’s assessment. Its purpose is to create frequent opportunities for pupils to reflect their learning in digital environments. The main idea is to design right from the beginning the basis and steps for pupils’ learning paths in order to support their future learning. This process also includes elements of self-assessment, which is expressed in the new national curriculum (EDUFI, 2014). 

Self-assessment refers to a pupil’s capabilities in identifying personal strengths when studying intentionally and resiliently towards learning goals. In this research creative exploration, asking questions and finding information have been chosen to be the core areas of investigation. 

Nicol & Macfarlane‐Dick (2006) suggest that the teacher’s feedback is a pedagogical tool when supporting pupils in developing their capabilities for self-assessment and identifying their personal strengths. Good feedback practices can support pupils to take control of their learning. Therefore, formative assessment in digital environments is applied in this project, and the teacher gives qualitative and versatile feedback both on single classroom activities and long projects.  

It is important that pupils learn to set their own learning goals together with the teacher in the early school years. The ability to set goals step by step forms the basis of the pupils’ learning path with the help of teachers. 

To develop assessment for learning culture in collaboration with homes, pupils’ study activities, their reflections and teacher’s feedback are vital when making all this transparent to the parents. They have an opportunity to follow their children’s learning by reading, watching and listening to pupils’ learning results, products and reflections online. Parents are encouraged to give comments to their children online. In this way feedback and assessment given by the teacher is also open to the parents through these digital environments.  

There is little evidence of developing assessment for learning culture in research literature. Therefore, this study aims at testing several digital environments systematically and it tries to explore new solutions how the teachers, pupils and parents could be engaged in developing assessment for learning culture. In this project, the definition of engagement in terms of social, emotional, behavioral and academic dimensions is used for characterizing school and home collaboration (Fredricks et al., 2004; Kim & Sheridan, 2015).  

21 pupils, aged 8 and 9, and their second and third grade class teacher and 21 parents participate in this study. Three online ICT-based platforms, Seesaw, Qridi and Google Suites for Education (GSE) are used in order to test and compare their qualities and appropriateness for assessment. Seesaw is a pupil-driven digital portfolio which has been chosen to be one of the applications for testing for this study. Pupils can collect their learning documents and assignments of various school subjects in one place which enables pupils to share them with their parents. Qridi is a Finnish online ICT-based platform which is used at University Teacher Training School. It is employed mainly to assess behavior. Google Suites for Education (GSE) will be tested during autumn 2019. GSE is an online learning environment developed especially for educational purposes. In this project it is going to be used for pupils’ continuous self-assessment in mathematics, science and peer-assessment. The role of GSE will be defined more accurately later. The poster presentation will focus on the experiences from Seesaw and Qridi. The collected data used for the poster presentation consists of interviews with pupils and parents as well as group discussions with parents. Pupils’ materials and assessments downloaded from the defined digital platforms as well as the teacher’s notes about the research process and classroom observations are studied in this context. The data is analyzed using qualitative theory-guided content analysis (Elo & Kyngäs, 2008; Gibbs, 2007). Nicol’s and Macfarlane-Dick’s (2006) conceptual model of self-regulation and feedback, and Fredricks et al.’s (2004) view of school engagement is used as a theoretical guide for analysis.

This study aims at showing how educational partnerships and assessment with parents and school could be organized and improved in digital environments. This is important in answering to the needs of the 2016 Finnish curriculum, where collaboration with parents, pupils’ self-assessment skills and holistic learning paths are emphasized. As to the participating pupils, learning new kind of working and assessment practices enables pupils to learn to set concrete learning goals for themselves. Pupils can also learn to reflect their working skills and emotions both on general and detailed levels. Furthermore, versatile qualitative ways of making self-assessment in digital platforms opens opportunities to express personally important and meaningful aspects of learning. However, the pupils’ engagement in making interconnections between their own learning objectives and reflections seems to be challenging for them. From experiences gained so far it seems that participation and behavioral engagement of parents to this kind of collaboration varies a lot from some observing passively to some participating and actively commenting. Those parents who participate either passively or actively appreciate the possibility to see “behind” the annual school assessment and to see and understand the actual processes and arguments of assessment. As to the participating teacher, the preliminary findings of this study suggest that using digital platforms engages teacher into giving regular and justified feedback to pupils. The teacher has to verbalize, personalize and formulate the feedback appropriate to the learning situation and pupils’ personal learning results. In this process, the teacher commits herself to improving the quality of feedback and her knowledge about an individual pupil grows and deepens. Consequently, preliminary findings so far suggest that using digital platforms for making the assessment process visible and shared for all parties, pupils, parents and the teacher, has created new opportunities for all to engage in schoolwork and culture.

Elo, S., & Kyngäs, S H. (2008). The qualitative content analysis process. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 62(1), 107–115. EDUFI (2014). National Core Curriculum for Basic Education. Finnish National Board for Education [Finnish National Agency for Education], Publications 2016:5, Next Print Oy, Helsinki. Fredricks, J. A., Blumenfeld, P. C., & Paris, A. H. (2004). School engagement: Potential of the concept, state of the evidence. Review of educational research, 74(1), 59-109. Gibbs, G. (2007). Analysing qualitative data. London: Sage Publications. Kim, E. M., & Sheridan, S. M. (2015). Foundational aspects of family–school connections: Definitions, conceptual frameworks, and research needs. In Foundational aspects of family-school partnership research (pp. 1-14). Springer, Cham. Nicol, D. J., & Macfarlane‐Dick, D. (2006). Formative assessment and self‐regulated learning: A model and seven principles of good feedback practice. Studies in higher education, 31(2), 199-218.