ASSESSMENT & EVALUATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION

2020, VOL. 45, NO. 2, 266–278

https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2019.1637513

How first-year students perceive and experience assessment

of academic literacies
Jiming Zhoua , Ke Zhaob and Phillip Dawsonc
a
Fudan University, China; bShanghai University of Finance and Economics, China; cDeakin
University, Australia

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
First-year university students’ underdeveloped academic literacies can assessment; academic
lead to dissatisfaction and poor performance. University teachers find it literacies; Chinese students;
difficult to take action without an understanding of students’ percep- first-year transition
tions and needs. This study investigates first-year Chinese students’ per-
ceptions and experiences related to assessment of academic literacies in
an English-as-a-foreign-language university context. The datasets include
student focus groups at two different time points over their first univer-
sity year, self-reflective essays written by students at the end of the
year, and audio records of nine units of teaching in three teachers’
classes. Findings highlight that fostering students’ academic literacies
incorporates both linguistic development and epistemological adapta-
tion. Students held mixed feelings towards alternative assessment other
than examinations. Their personal learning goals of using English in
everyday scenarios dampened their commitment to teachers’ goals of
developing learners’ academic literacies. Findings suggest assessment
can be an effective ‘card’ played by teachers to nurture students’ appre-
ciation of new learning goals, communicate areas for improvement in
learning strategies, and demonstrate their visible progress.

Introduction
Higher education students are increasingly travelling across continents and cultures, and
‘international students’ now make up a significant proportion of students in English-speaking
countries (Altbach and Knight 2007). While notable achievements have been made in developing
students’ capability with the English language, the broader academic capabilities required for
study at western universities have proven more challenging (Evans and Morrison 2011;
Horstmanshof and Brownie 2013). There is a useful body of literature explaining how students
can be supported to develop these capabilities in western universities (e.g. Durkin 2011; Wingate
and Tribble 2012), however, by the time they have reached their host country it may already be
too late. International students underdeveloped English language academic literacies can lead to
dissatisfaction and poor assessment performance (Hirvela and Du 2013; Wu 2015); tutors in
Western universities also find it difficult to take action without an understanding of students’
perceptions and needs (Tapp 2015).
Students’ perceptions of learning goals and their learning strategies are, to a large extent,
shaped by their past learning experiences (Ashwin and Trigwell 2012; Xu 2012), but they can

CONTACT Ke Zhao zhao.ke@mail.shufe.edu.cn

ß 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 ASSESSMENT & EVALUATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION 267

also be reframed by university assessment (Boud et al. 2018; Zhao, Zhang and Du 2017). The
content, form and feedback of assessment convey information about the skills and learning
approaches that are valued in university contexts (Wingate 2010; Boud et al. 2018). In this paper,
we explore the role of assessment in helping first-year students in a Chinese university to
develop academic literacies in English as a foreign language (hereafter abbreviated as academic
literacies). The findings will provide better understandings of how Chinese students’ prior learn-
ing and assessment experiences influence their perceptions of the educational goals set by uni-
versities and teachers. Based on students’ perceptions and practices in response to different
teachers’ assessment enactment, the study carries implications on using assessment to accultur-
ate first-year students into a community of academic practices.

Literature review
With respect to the notion of ‘academic literacies’, existing studies (Lea and Street 2006; Tapp
2015) argue for understanding it as social practices and against merely depicting the term as a
collection of reading and writing skills. Students participate in social practices related to aca-
demic literacies, shaping and negotiating their identities and social relations in an academic
community of practice (Saltmarsh and Saltmarsh 2008). The reading and writing problems
encountered by students are by no means merely a linguistic issue (Lea and Street 2006;
Wingate and Tribble 2012). With heterogeneous backgrounds and various personal learning
goals, university students do not necessarily agree with their teachers’ expectations. Some
researchers (Saltmarsh and Saltmarsh 2008; Hathaway 2015; Tapp 2015) highlight the importance
of reshaping students’ epistemological beliefs. Others begin to question the legitimacy of
describing or even expecting students and teachers to belong to the same communities of prac-
tice (Canton, Govan and Zahn 2018).
Studies about Chinese students in western university contexts support a social practices view
of academic literacies. University expectations and disciplinary requirements may be misaligned
with students’ previous experiences and identities (Lea and Street, 2006; Wingate and Tribble,
2012). The perceptual mismatches between students and teachers are salient in the first univer-
sity year (Ashwin and Trigwell 2012). Two mainland Chinese students in Hirvela and Du’s study
(2013) interpreted paraphrasing skills as a linguistically oriented rearrangement tool, but they ‘hit
a wall in their understanding’ (p.96) about the knowledge transforming element in the assess-
ment task. In Skyrme’s (2007) study set in a New Zealand university, one Chinese student prided
himself on his well-developed English speaking skills but failed to recognize the importance of
reading and writing in university contexts. Chinese postgraduate students in British universities
reported difficulties in finding out what their teachers were looking for in their writing assign-
ments (Wu 2015), and found it even more challenging to respond to teachers’ comments such
as ‘you should be more critical’ (Durkin 2011).
Previous studies report that academic literacies courses, particularly their assessment practices,
function well in developing students’ academic reading and writing skills. Wingate (2010), for
instance, found that teachers’ repeated feedback in the first semester enabled students to pro-
gress fast in their academic writing. In a later study, Li and Hu (2018) found that teachers’ direct
(e.g. using exemplars) and indirect (e.g. providing formative feedback) scaffolding encouraged
postgraduate students to use their own sources of meaning making. Wang’s study (2017)
reported that rubrics for an English writing assignment guided university students to conduct
self-assessment in an English as a foreign language context.
This paper argues that the body of academic literacies research now needs to be extended to
investigate the role of assessment in reshaping students’ beliefs about the nature of knowledge
and their related learning practices. More attention needs to be paid to students for whom
English is a foreign or additional language (Wingate and Tribble 2012). Large-scale surveys in
268 J. ZHOU ET AL.

Table 1. Teacher information.

Formal training experience in language
Teacher Gender Teaching experience testing/assessment
Edward M 25 years No
Megan F 4 years 7 years
Julia F 10 years No

Chinese university settings (e.g. Guo and Shi 2016) found students had insufficient knowledge
about university learning, assessment practices and participatory strategies. We need a more
nuanced understanding of the interplay between assessment, students’ epistemological beliefs
and academic literacies.

Methodology
We took a qualitative approach to understanding first-year Chinese students’ perceptions and
experiences related to assessment of academic literacies.

Context
This study was set in one of the ‘national key universities’ (Chinese equivalent to the UK Russell
Group). In this university located in Shanghai, about 40% undergraduates further their master
education in western universities, and 20% undergraduates are enrolled in Sino-foreign joint
bachelor programs. This means that student participants were based in this university to com-
plete their first-year learning and English language transition, before they continue their studies
in domestic and overseas universities.
The academic literacies course was designed for first-year non-English major students, with
the aim of equipping students with necessary English academic and language competence to
participate in practices like information searching, critical reading, synthesis writing and oral pre-
senting. It spread over two 12-week semesters and comprised 48 classes (72 contact hours) in
the whole academic year. Teachers reached an agreement that class time would be mainly used
for evaluating students’ performance in information review, critical discussion, and oral or written
reports, instead of for explaining vocabulary or text meanings as in a conventional language-ori-
ented course. The assessment comprised 20% for student daily performance like group discus-
sion and oral presentation, 20% for writing assignments, 20% and 40% for the mid-term and
final examination (with items like reading, synthesizing and critical comment writing).

Participants
This study adopted the principle of purposeful sampling. Selection criteria included:

1. Student participants were enrolled in the academic literacies course but were taught by dif-
ferent teachers. Such variations might illuminate reflection on the influence of teacher fac-
tors in using assessment to promote academic literacies. Table 1 provides information on
the three teachers (with Edward, Megan, and Julia as their pseudonyms).
2. Each focus group included all the original study-group members as allocated by their teach-
ers, in order to nurture a more natural and informative discussion atmosphere.

Twenty-five students (11 males and 14 females) participated in six focus groups in the first
semester. Three groups were taught by Edward, two by Megan and one by Julia. One student
group taught by Edward and one by Megan could not participate in the focus groups in the
 ASSESSMENT & EVALUATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION 269

second semester because of the time clash with their study schedules. They gave consent to use
relevant data in the first round of focus groups and classroom observation. Sixteen students
(two groups taught by Edward, one by Megan and one by Julia) shared their perceptions and
experiences in the second semester.

Data collection
Focus group discussions lasted one and a half hours, on average. The number of students in each
focus group was four or five. Such a group size was ‘large enough to gain a variety of perspectives
and small enough not to become disorderly or fragmented’ (Rabiee, 2004, p. 656). Discussion
themes included students’ personal learning goals, prior assessment experiences, understanding of
assessment purpose and criteria, assessment preparing and participating experiences. This study
tried to address the potential groupthink problem of focus group research by creating a comfort-
able environment and skilfully facilitating group interaction. To facilitate spontaneous responses,
students were encouraged to interact and express their opinions in their first language – Mandarin.
At the end of the academic year, students were invited to write reflections in Chinese and
send them directly to the researchers. Seven students (two taught by Megan, three by Edward,
and two by Julia) voluntarily wrote and sent reflective essays. Nine units of teaching (three units
in each of the three teachers’ classrooms) were observed and audio recorded in the
two semesters.

Data analysis
Audio data of focus groups was transcribed verbatim, and together with students’ reflective
essays, they were separated according to the different teachers. Students were assigned identifi-
cation codes S1_E – S10_E (taught by Edward), S11_M – S20_M (taught by Megan), and S21_J -
S25_J (taught by Julia).
The first two authors conducted an inductive thematic analysis of the student dataset (Braun
and Clark 2006). Metaphors (e.g. a hollow box, a castle in the air) used by students were selected
as initial in vivo codes. Excerpts from student datasets were grouped under the initial codes and
emerging themes. The most pertinent excerpts were translated into English by the first author. A
sample of the English versions was translated back into Chinese by the second author, and any
misalignment with students’ original responses were corrected. After codes and themes had
been verified, a thematic summary describing each group was written and verified by all the
researchers.
With respect to the classroom dataset, 24, 35 and 27 assessment scenarios were identified in
Megan’s, Edward’s and Julia’s classes from the audio recordings. Teachers’ framing statements
and feedback comments in these assessment activities were all delivered in English, so no trans-
lation procedure was involved. Such introduction and feedback were transcribed verbatim and
analysed via a theoretical thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006). Special attention was given
to whether and how teachers introduced assessment purposes. Teachers’ feedback was catego-
rized by the four categories proposed by Chetwynd and Dobbyn (2011), i.e., retrospective on
content, retrospective on skills, future-altering on content, and future-altering on skills. Feedback
in a specific category appearing in one assessment task was counted as ‘1’.
Patterns emerging from the student dataset were interpreted together with teachers’ assess-
ment practices. Major themes are listed in Table 2.

Findings
The findings section is structured around major themes related to students’ (un)changing per-
ceptions and behavior of assessment over the whole academic year. Patterns emerging from
classroom data are reported to illustrate the influence of teacher assessment practices.
270 J. ZHOU ET AL.

Table 2. Major themes.

Students’ perceptions
 Perceptions of assessment-
preparing activities
 Beliefs about knowledge
 Personal learning goals
 Self-efficacy
 Being engaged or marginalized
Students’ experiences
 Assessment-preparing strategies
 Assessment shock
 Learning gains
 Participation opportunities
Teachers’ practices
 Introducing assessment purposes
 Scaffolding Assessment participation
 Feedback content
 Connection among tasks

Theme 1: Students’ mixed feelings towards test-preparation activities: ‘led you to high
scores but left you standing on hollow boxes’
Focus groups with students in the first semester revealed that they mainly relied on memorizing,
doing exercises and mock examinations as their major English learning strategies before they
entered universities. They were familiar with and good at participating in assessment tasks like
doing paper-and-pencil mock examinations, with the purpose of getting high scores in high-
stakes examinations.
We know all too well how to deal with the traditional methods of assessment. We recited some words and
paragraphs and those ‘knowledge points’ before the final examination. This strategy normally rewarded us
with high scores. (S13_M)

Although such prior learning and assessment experience rewarded students with high scores,
subsequently leading to university admission, students expressed mixed feelings towards their
familiar assessment tasks. On the one hand, they reported a lack of fulfilment when they partici-
pated in alternative assessment other than doing exercises or mock examinations. They also
demonstrated a relatively low degree of engagement when they perceived incongruence
between assessment tasks in class and external standardized tests.
I missed the experience of doing English exercises and mock examinations. It gave me the concrete feeling
that I was learning English. (S14_M)
We also need to pay attention to the external examinations. After all, examinations are so important in the
Chinese context. (S23_J)
What do we learn English for in China? Pragmatically for passing the CET-4 and CET-6 tests. In these tests
when we answer the reading comprehension items, do we need to summarize the content and take some
notes? I don’t think so. That’s why I think these skills are utterly useless. (S15_M)

On the other hand, students longed for ‘real learning gains’ besides good test performance.
One student compared test-preparing activities to piling up ‘hollow boxes’:
Preparing for those external tests is like piling boxes up. Boxes are piled into a stack so that you can achieve a
goal – the goal can be an expected score, or passing the test and getting the certificate, or just looking
decent on your transcript. However, those boxes are hollow without consolidated substance in them. (S4_E)

In summary, students mainly relied on doing mock examinations as their assessment prepar-
ation strategies, and such strategies proved to be effective in the pre-tertiary assessment experi-
ence. In alignment with this practice were their understandings of learning English language as
accumulating knowledge points. There was a tension between learning and preparedness for
high-stakes testing, with some students expressing that the strategies that provided short-term
retention did not lead to meaningful learning.

Theme 2: Student-teacher perceptual mismatches in the interpretation of learning goals:

‘synthesis writing is building a castle in the air’
Holding these mixed feelings towards their prior learning and assessment patterns, five out of
the six focus groups reported that their personal learning goals were to ‘use’ knowledge.
 ASSESSMENT & EVALUATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION 271

My aim for learning English is to understand what the foreigners say, to read authentic English novels, and
to watch English movies. (S5_E)

Students envisioned their ‘use’ of knowledge in daily scenarios, in contrast to their teachers’
goals of fostering learners’ English language academic literacies, such as summarizing the main
idea of a piece, analysing authors’ stances and making critical judgements.
Students noticed this mismatch between their personal learning goals and the teachers’
intended learning outcomes. In the first semester when they initially encountered assessment in
the form of group discussion and synthesis writing, most students did not find this valuable.
They believed a large repertoire of English vocabulary was the learning foundations, whereas
assessment aiming at those higher-order learning skills was compared to ‘building castles in
the air’:
We have these various assessment tasks to evaluate how we synthesize information, but vocabulary is the
foundation. This new curriculum gives me the feeling of building castles in the air. (S9_E)

In alignment with their valued learning goals, students believed more classroom time should
be allocated to vocabulary learning or contingent English speaking tasks.
Among the six groups, one group of students described their perceptions of learning goals as
different from using English in daily life, which were quite in line with teachers’ perceptions. This
group said that ‘in this course, we are not learning daily English, we are learning English to do
more demanding thinking tasks’. When expressing their agreement with new learning goals in
the university context, one student recalled how her teacher Julia highlighted the ‘usefulness’ of
the skills at the beginning of the first semester:
I think this purpose is justifiable. Just as our teacher told us in the first week, having good fluency in
speaking daily English is not enough. When we work in a company, they will not expect us to talk about
what we’ve eaten for breakfast! We will be expected to do all those complex things, like searching for
information, synthesizing and forming our own opinion. (S21_J)

Overall, students reported their university learning goals as applying knowledge. Knowledge
application was interpreted by students in two particular ways. First, they aspired to develop
English application skills in daily scenarios, in contrast to the teaching goals of fostering stu-
dents’ reading and writing skills in academic scenarios. Second, students felt assessment only
focusing on knowledge application (e.g. synthesizing information) overlooked their ‘knowledge
foundation’, hence like ‘building castles in the air’. One group of students appreciated the goal
of developing academic literacies, perhaps due to their teacher’s explicit communications at the
beginning of the course.

Theme 3: Participating in assessment and realizing learning deficiencies: from ‘my

english is good enough’ to ‘I am desperate’
At the beginning of the first semester, some students expressed self-confidence in assessment
participation, as illustrated in the excerpt below:
The synthesizing task requires us to do some group discussion before writing the summary down. Our
English is good enough for the discussion. Therefore, no need to prepare for a long time before
class. (S11_M)

These confident students soon experienced ‘assessment shock’ when they found it difficult to
present satisfying answers to their teachers. Before class, S9_E read a long English article and
used a dictionary to determine the Chinese meanings of all the new words, only to find she
could not answer Edward’s in-class questions about the article’s main idea and its logical flow. In
Julia’s class, S23_J disputed Julia’s comment that he had not prepared for the class, saying he
‘had looked up all the unfamiliar words’, and that Julia had not told them to ‘search for back-
ground information about the topic’.
272 J. ZHOU ET AL.

After their first participations in assessment tasks targeting on synthesizing skills, most stu-
dents expressed bewilderment. Lack of knowledge about the rules of the game drove some stu-
dents ‘desperate’:
The teacher would evaluate us in how to synthesize an article. It’s difficult to prepare for it. I feel
desperate. (S14_M)

Initially, students had no idea what they did not know in terms of academic literacies, and
they tended to place too much confidence in their existing skillset. Assessment informed stu-
dents of their current levels of performance. When students adopted their accustomed prepara-
tory strategies and found their engagement did not lead to learning achievement, they suffered
from assessment shock and anxiety.

Theme 4: (Un)changing understandings of learning and assessment: ‘knowledge points

are not as important as they were for me’
When four groups of students participated in the focus groups in the second semester, some
students described a changed understanding of learning, as illustrated in the follow-
ing quotations:
I feel that ‘knowledge points’ were not as important as they were for me in the first semester. (S23_ J)

In high schools, maybe because of the time limits or the external high-stakes examination, teachers usually
directly told you the ‘correct’ answer. Now, the results are collaboratively produced and synthesized within
a group. It may not be accurate, but we improve by doing these activities during the semester. (S11_M)

Students taught by Edward, however, expressed their confusion about where they were going
in the second semester.
In high school, we knew where we were going by doing those mock examinations. Now, I look up new
words and read those reading materials. However, I have been unclear about the purpose of these
things … I hope he will give us a timetable describing what we will do during this period and what we will
get. Now it’s like ‘you just follow me’, but we are not sure about the outcome. (S3_E)

Students’ (un)changing understandings of learning and assessment prompted the researchers

to closely investigate teachers’ assessment practices. In light of students’ difficulties in appreciat-
ing new learning goals and participating in assessment, the three teachers explicitly delivered
relevant information in their assessment framing statements, though to different extents. The
percentage of assessment tasks with explicit learning goal information was 54% (Megan), 17%
(Edward), and 26% (Julia) in their respective three units of teaching. Some examples of teachers’
assessment framing statements are:
The ultimate goal of learning an English text is not just to understand it. One day, you will have the
competency to write a similar-level text or to give a presentation on a similar topic. (Megan_ Assessment 5)

When you are in a company and you need to do a report, your ideas must be based on content. You need
to first summarize the ideas or contents and then give your own comment. You’ll use the synthesizing skill
on many occasions. (Julia_ Assessment 8)

Megan and Julia also incorporated assessment participation instructions when they introduced
assessment to students. In response to students’ obsession with vocabulary learning, Megan rec-
ommended them to ‘not only self-learn vocabulary, but also search for background information
related to the themes of the reading materials, note down keywords or draw graphs of the essay
structures, and use one sentence to synthesize the main idea’. Julia explicitly emphasized that
‘your homework not only includes figuring out the meaning of new words but also understand-
ing those intangible concepts and information’. In the first semester, she even listed those intan-
gible subtasks on the slides to remind her students.
 ASSESSMENT & EVALUATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION 273

Edward introduced his assessment tasks differently from Megan and Julia. In most assess-
ment tasks (23 of the total 35 observed tasks), Edward directly led students into a session of
‘checking answers’. He used simple leading sentences, such as ‘Let’s look at the questions’,
‘Let’s check the answers’, or ‘Which one do you think is the best synthesis’. Such framing
statements reflected his tendency to assess the predetermined content in a linear progres-
sion. On some occasions, he mentioned the value of the targeted skills and the procedures
of participating in assessment, though he did so less frequently than Megan and Julia. Here
is one selected excerpt:
Only understanding the meaning is not enough; the academic purpose is to integrate the material in a very
concise and coherent piece of writing. This ability to synthesize is very important. (Edward_ Assessment 9)

Taking students’ perceptions and teachers’ assessment practices into consideration, the
excerpts demonstrate the importance of teachers’ explicit explanations about the values of learn-
ing goals and assessment participation procedures. Without teachers’ explanations, it was quite
difficult for students to understand what the most effective learning strategies were, and how
participating in one assessment after another would lead them to achieving the final and
abstract learning goals.

Theme 5: the importance of even participatory opportunities and visible progress:

‘teacher played the assessment card in a different way’
Unlike their unanimous doubts about the value of assessment related to high-order thinking
skills in the first semester, students taught by the three teachers expressed quite different
opinions toward assessment in the second semester. Those over-confident students stopped
talking about their ‘good enough’ English and began to share the progress they made
through assessment preparation and participation. Satisfaction with learning gains was
mainly reported by students taught by Megan and Julia, touching upon the aspects of infor-
mation searching, group discussion and critical evaluation as illustrated in the follow-
ing excerpts:
I found I was not good at finding useful information. Our teacher recommended interesting websites to us,
and I found more useful articles when I did the search. I felt great joy in this process. (S11_M)

In the middle school, the teacher would give us a ‘childish’ topic and ask us to discuss it. We have no
passion! Now the article is quite difficult, and the four group members all get some problems to address.
The in-group discussion is helpful for comprehension. Then if there is a mutual problem, we will ask our
teacher. (S16_M)

Though we haven’t done very well in ‘critical’ comment, we know how many dimensions we need to
consider to evaluate others’ synthesis. (S21_J)

S13_M used the metaphor of ‘teacher played the card in a different way’ to describe assess-
ment design and enactment different from those focusing on reproducing knowledge points in
secondary schools.
In this class, the teacher does not play her cards in the usual way. You need to rely on your daily
accumulation, your efforts in reading the extended materials and writing to summarize. It’s not very easy to
get a high grade. We put in more effort. (S13_M)

‘Playing the card in a different way’ also means that Megan generated participatory opportu-
nities for every student. Instead of didactically emphasizing ‘when your peers are speaking, you
should listen very carefully and make critical comment’, as Edward did in Assessment_20, Megan
chose to randomly invite one student from the group to synthesize the group discussion. For
students, this strategy meant that they did not know who would be assessed:
274 J. ZHOU ET AL.

Morally, we need to listen carefully to others. But you cannot regulate our behaviour through moral rules. For
me, the concern that my teacher may suddenly ask me to synthesize the discussion content urges me to
concentrate. (S15_M)

While students taught by Megan and Julia reflected on their learning gains, students taught
by Edward talked more about how they have been marginalized and how they disengaged
themselves through silence. One student wrote ‘silence is an attitude’ in her reflective essay at
the end of the academic year, to explain her relatively low degree of engagement
into assessment.
We read this article, and looked up so many new words before class, only to summarize it in a few
sentences in class. There is no sense of fulfilment. It’s not like in high school when we had our scores to
clearly tell us the effects of our learning. We cannot feel our progress. Our teacher may hardly notice what I
have done. (S6_E)

Due to the concealment of clear goals and criteria, students believed that they needed to
earn Edward’s attention to obtain higher scores for their daily performance. When oral synthe-
sis tasks were shouldered by the most capable student in a group, the ‘silent majority’
students taught by Edward felt they had been marginalized. The subsequent writing synthesis
tasks did not make them feel better, because they were unable to get their teacher’s per-
sonal attention.
A closer examination of teacher feedback content further explained why Edward’s students
did not feel visible progress. Figure 1 shows the percentage of the four types of teacher feed-
back (i.e. retrospective on content, retrospective on skills, future-altering on content, and future-
altering on skills) based on the taxonomies proposed by Chetwynd and Dobbyn (2011).
One striking feature is the large number of retrospective feedback on content delivered by
Edward (27 out of the 35 observed assessment tasks), in contrast to the smallest number of
future-altering feedback on skills (5 out of 35). In Megan’s and Julia’s assessment tasks, retro-
spective feedback on content and future-altering feedback on skills comprised the two largest
categories. In other words, Megan and Julia not only conveyed a message on how students had
performed in the specific tasks, but also provided information on how they had improved in
terms of learning skills and how to make further progress. They delivered more future-altering
feedback on skills than on content, which made the feedback more transferrable.
For example, in Megan_ Assessment 6, a reading comprehension task, she reminded students
that they should search for information and collect solid evidence for their in-class discussion.
She explained that ‘this (background knowledge) was traditionally provided by the teacher, but
now you should have the awareness to learn by yourselves’. In Megan_ Assessment 13, she con-
firmed students’ progress and made suggestions on how to improve:
As I looked around, I found that most of you had done thorough before-class research. It was very good
research on the background information about this article in The Economist. You should also synthesize
these pieces of information and figure out what factors have led to this company’s success.

After several classes with these students, Megan assumed that students had gradually under-
stood what they needed to do in the pre-reading session. She, therefore, asked each group to
raise ten questions related to the reading material. They were also required to rate the answers
provided by the other groups. She delivered feedback that ‘most groups had shown evidence of
progress in terms of identifying important points both in language forms and in comprehension’.
Megan’s feedback targeted not only specific task content but also students’ progress in learning
skills. Internal connections within assessment tasks made students’ progress visible.
To summarize, didactic communication about learning goals and assessment participation
procedures is necessary but not sufficient. Participatory opportunities engaged more students.
Teachers’ confirmation of students’ progress in learning content and skills instilled in students a
sense of personal fulfillment.
 ASSESSMENT & EVALUATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION 275

Figure 1. Categories of feedback in the three teachers’ assessment.

Discussion
Findings in this study highlight the influence of prior assessment experiences on students’ per-
ceptions (themes 1 and 2) and the mediating role of assessment in developing first-year stu-
dents’ academic literacies (themes 3-5). At the beginning of the first year, student participants
reported more perceptions about learning as accumulating ‘knowledge points’. They were used
to doing mock examinations as an assessment preparing strategy and perceived those tasks
which only focused on language application as neglecting the importance of foundational know-
ledge. This finding in a university in Shanghai is consistent with research findings about Chinese
students in some western universities (e.g. Skyrme 2007; Durkin 2011; Hirvela and Du, 2013;
Wu 2015).
Notwithstanding the influence of previous assessment experience, students wished to gain
substantial improvement through preparing for assessments. One student drew an analogy
between test-oriented learning strategies and piling up a stack of hollow boxes. Some students
in this study also welcomed alternative assessment, on the premise that they were convinced of
the learning gains and the connection between assessment and the real world (Theme 1). This
finding is useful in breaking the cultural stereotype of Chinese students as prioritizing examina-
tions over alternative assessment. The novelty of assessment per se was not unwelcome; it was
the vagueness of assessment requirements, targeted goals and participatory requirements that
made some students ‘desperate’ (theme 3). This finding, together with similar results reported
from university contexts in other Confucian heritage cultures (e.g. Hong Kong in Carless and
Zhou 2016; Japan in Wicking 2019), reminds us of the school-university contextual differences.
Having passed the threshold of university entrance examinations, students in Confucian heritage
cultures are more open to alternative assessment. It is thus crucial to seize the precious transi-
tional year and maximize the learning-facilitating role of assessment.
This paper supports fostering students’ academic literacies incorporating both linguistic train-
ing and epistemological adaptation (Wingate and Tribble 2012; Hathaway 2015). Assessment has
been observed as a powerful mediating factor to foster such an adaptation. Assessment in the
form of oral discussion with peers and synthesis writing exposed students’ problems in academic
literacies and learning strategies (Theme 3). Realizing the multi-faceted nature of academic
276 J. ZHOU ET AL.

literacies motivated some Chinese students in this study and the student in Skyrme’s (2007)
study likewise. By foregrounding assessment of academic literacies in their classrooms, teachers
conveyed information about the valued skills in university contexts (as recommended in Boud
et al. 2018). Some students’ epistemological beliefs and learning practices evolved as they par-
ticipated in assessment, confirming the findings in some studies about academic literacies (e.g.
Wingate 2010; Wang 2017; Li and Hu 2018). Other students in this study, however, demonstrated
limited evidence of change in the focus groups and their reflective essays. Assessment is a
powerful card that teachers can play to foster students’ learning, but how to play the card makes
all the difference.

Implications and conclusion

This study carries pedagogical implications on enacting assessment to develop first-year univer-
sity students’ academic literacies. First, findings indicate the importance of explicit communica-
tion about learning goals in the new learning context (theme 4). This paper provides empirical
evidence for Lea and Street’s (2006) argument about how important it is to nurture students’
understanding and valuing of academic literacies. Academic literacies comprise a set of practices
that students are supposed to know the rules of but actually may not. This study found that stu-
dents did not know: 1) academic literacies related to their English language application compe-
tence in academic scenarios instead of in daily scenarios; 2) some high-order learning skills, such
as critical English reading and writing, were more important for them than they thought; 3)
developing these skills required new learning approaches beyond learning vocabulary (theme 2
& 3). Students had difficulties in understanding the game rules without teachers’ explicit commu-
nication (Tapp 2015). Teachers are recommended to explicitly explain the values of learning
goals and new learning strategies (Carless and Zhou 2016).
Furthermore, the contrastive analysis of students’ (un)changing perceptions and teachers’
assessment practices highlighted the importance of details in assessment enactment (theme 5).
While teachers’ didactic communication about assessment purposes and procedures served as a
useful prelude, even and genuine assessment participation granted students with a platform to
demonstrate their learning gains and reflect on their learning gaps. First-year students did not
readily apply strategies introduced by their English teachers (Evans and Morrison 2011); instead,
they improved academic literacies by engaging themselves in practices. When Edward’s students
had limited opportunities to display their skills, they ‘had no sense of fulfilment’, or felt feedback
mainly targeting content as irrelevant. In contrast, Megan ‘played the card in a different way’ for
students to open and reshape their identities to other ways of being. Her students felt obliged
to be engaged, in order to answer Megan’s calls for participating in assessment. Iterative engage-
ment and the visible progress emerging from connected assessment tasks nurtured students’
active learning.
Previous studies have mainly emphasized students’ epistemological adaptation (e.g. Hathaway
2015). This paper argues that teachers also need epistemological adaptation when working with
first-year university students. Students in this study demonstrated a low level of commitment to
new learning goals, overconfidence in current competence and unfamiliarity with assessment
participation procedures in the first semester. If teachers do not perceive these characters as ‘lack
of engagement’ or ‘unsophisticated’, they are more likely to interpret them as bridges rather
than barriers to assimilating students. Considering most first-year students, whether native or
non-native speakers of English, in and outside western universities, are newcomers to the univer-
sity community of academic practices (Wingate and Tribble 2012), the need for teachers’ epis-
temological adaptation and some pedagogical implications discussed in this paper can be
extended beyond Chinese students and universities.
 ASSESSMENT & EVALUATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION 277

This paper also carries theoretical implications for extending the notions of academic litera-
cies. We detected students’ meaning negotiation around the concept of academic literacies –
they rejected the learning goals of developing themselves as legitimate members in an academic
community of practice. University students’ preference of identities as vocational community par-
ticipants over scholarly community participants has been observed not only among Chinese stu-
dents but also in studies set in other countries (e.g. Canton et al. 2018). In response to students’
meaning negotiation in this study, teachers described reading and writing skills as not only aca-
demic skills but also employable skills (theme 4). This finding resonates with Rust and Froud’s
(2011) call to unite the academic and employability agendas into one joint enterprise instead of
dichotomizing them. As university students are more heterogeneous in their learning goals, cul-
tural and language backgrounds against the backdrop of higher education internationalization,
academic literacies courses will be more engaging if the goals are to cultivate both scholarly and
employability skills.
To conclude, this study supports that fostering students’ academic literacies incorporates both
linguistic development and epistemological adaptation. Assessment proved to be an effective
‘card’ teachers could play to nurture students’ appreciation of new learning goals, a way to
inform students of their insufficiency in competence and learning strategies, and a vehicle to
make students’ progress visible.

Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China (grant 17CYY022).

ORCID
Jiming Zhou http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3797-0441
Ke Zhao http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9791-0275
Phillip Dawson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4513-8287

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