‘Finally studying for myself’ – examining student agency in summative and formative self-assessment models

Abstract

Promoting student agency has been seen as the primary function for new generation assessment environments. In this paper, we introduce two models of self-assessment as a way to foster students’ sense of agency. A socio-cultural framework was utilised to understand the interaction between student agency and self-assessment. Through a comparative design, we investigated whether formative self-assessment and summative self-assessment, based on self-grading, would offer students different affordances for agency. The results show that while both models offered affordances for agentic learning, future-driven agency was only presented by the students studying according to the summative model. Our results shed light on the interplay of student agency and self-assessment in higher education.