Book Creator as a tool of formative assessment in the TEFL classroom: Emergency remote teaching during wartime

This paper explores the innovative use of Book Creator as an emergency formative assessment tool in a higher education context. Book Creator, a platform for creating digital books, portfolios, and interactive multimedia projects, was adapted by the authors to urgently maintain students' progress and conduct formative assessment in the TEFL course during emergency remote teaching. The study involved 32 third-year students majoring in Secondary Education and four university teachers who specialised in training pre-service teachers. The authors employed a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative analysis of student performance data with qualitative analysis of teacher reflections to evaluate the effectiveness of Book Creator as an emergency formative assessment tool within the TEFL course. Student performance data encompassed average scores for the generated TEFL books and students’ final exam scores, which were scrutinised using descriptive statistics, Krippendorff's alpha to ascertain interrater reliability, and Pearson correlation analysis to establish a relationship between TEFL book scores and final exam scores. The end-of-term outcomes in the TEFL course revealed a substantial correlation between students' proficiency in creating books and their academic performance. The study concludes that Book Creator is a potent formative assessment tool that fosters students' progress and autonomy in constructing pedagogical content knowledge in an emergency.