Integrating Assessment as Learning (AaL) in a Digital Storytelling Project: Empowering Preservice Teachers for their Learning

Much research emphasis has been placed on the implementation of formative assessment in higher education, while few studies have adopted the newly proposed Assessment as Learning (AaL) as the focal framework putting students at the center of the learning and assessment process (Lee et al., 2019; Gaynor, 2020). More recently, researchers believe that the adoption of AaL can create learning opportunities for students (Chan et al., 2022), yet it needs further clarification about the learning process evoked by the AaL tasks, especially in the technology and digital learning context.

With the advocacy of technology-integration in language teaching, it has been highlighted the value of incorporating digital storytelling into language teacher preparation programs (Buckley-Marudas & Martin, 2020), but there is scant attention paid to the use of formative assessment to facilitate pre-service teachers’ digital learning, let alone AaL. Therefore, this study adopted a qualitative research method unveiling the pre-service teachers’ gains concerning learning opportunities obtained from the AaL tasks in a digital storytelling project. The data were collected and triangulated by focused group interviews, group assessment forms, students’ written selfreflections, and digital storytelling teaching packages, with the involvement of six student mentors playing the roles of both assessors and practitioners. After thematic analysis, the findings have specified the students’ gained learning opportunities in respect of learning to be qualified assessors, learning from peer communication during and after peer assessment, and learning from self-reflection and self-regulation. Moreover, it confirms students’ positive attitudes towards the integration of AaL into digital storytelling learning. Afterward, this research sheds light on the practical strategies of AaL task design for future teacher application in technology or digital-storytelling integrated instructions.