In a climate of increasing resource constraints, there is a need for assessment designs that help students develop their agency and all-round development in sustainable ways. Recently, emphasis in the literature has started to shift beyond the need for literacy skills to respond to traditional feedback opportunities, towards understanding the importance of empowering learners to develop their own agency and self-efficacy within the process of feedback seeking, generating and sense-making (see Jensen et al. 2023).

There is little existing guidance on how teachers can design and deploy empowering assessment and feedback environments. This masterclass will explore a model of how effective feedback practices can be designed and deployed in ways that enable learners to draw on their peers as an effective learning resource, making comparisons with peers’ products and learning processes, learn vicariously through peers’ teacher feedback, and position themselves as the key agents in their own feedback orchestration and sense making processes.

Drawing on the concept of student formation through assessment (Nieminen & Yang, 2023) and empirically explored technology-mediated feedback practices (Wood, 2021; 2022a; 2022b; 2023), the session is likely to appeal to educators wishing to provide more formative support for learners in workload and budget sustainable ways.