Dr. Michael Holden (Assistant Professor, University of Winnipeg) was the 2025 David Bateson Award Winner for their research titled “Complexity thinking as a process for explicit professional learning about classroom assessment”

1. Where did you complete your Ph.D. and what was the title of your dissertation?
I completed my PhD at Queen’s University in 2024. My dissertation was titled “Classroom Assessment for Emergent Learning”.

2. What were your research questions?
In my dissertation, I examined how teachers provoke and support students’ emergent learning through formative classroom assessment. Specifically, I asked:
– What formative assessment conditions facilitate emergent learning in specific classroom contexts?
– What formative assessment interactions (e.g., between teachers, students, assessments, curricula) support emergent learning processes?
– How do these conditions, interactions, and effects shift as teachers iterate across different contexts and points in time?

3. Please provide a description of your research.
Emergent learning describes how learning is an adaptive and interactive process that “includes unpredictable, irreducible, and novel appearances” (Clayton, 2004, p. 38). Like formative assessment more broadly, emergent learning recognizes that students are active agents in making sense of, shaping, and responding to the teaching, learning, and assessment that is going on around them (Andrade, 2013; Brookhart, 2003). To better understand how teachers provoke and support that emergent learning through formative classroom assessment, I conducted a two-phase qualitative study with teachers from across Canada. In the first phase, I interviewed 12 teachers to learn about (1) their views, experiences with, and approaches to formative classroom assessment as well as (2) their experiences and approaches to emergent learning and the degree to which their formative assessment practices might provoke and support emergence. In the second phase, I developed action research plans with 3 of the phase one teachers to examine how those teachers provoked and supported emergent learning over the course of several weeks. Each action research project included classroom observations, researcher fieldnotes, additional interviews with participating teachers, document analysis, and system mappings to trace different features and interactions during the project.

Taken together, the findings describe six enabling conditions of classroom assessment for emergent learning: (1) flexibility, adaptability, and iteration; (2) mutual trust and student agency; (3) valuing learning as a shared, ongoing process; (4) anchored pedagogies; (5) equity in context; and (6) joy and confidence.

4. How are you continuing this work in your new role?
I am still studying how teachers and students navigate the complexities of classroom assessment. Recently that’s included the perils and possibilities of generative artificial intelligence (DeLuca et al., 2025), how different teachers understand fairness in classroom assessment (Rasooli et al., 2025), and professional learning opportunities focused on teaching, learning, and assessment alongside current classroom teachers (Holden et al., 2023).

5. What has been CERA’s impact on your work?
I’ve been attending CERA and CSSE since 2014. Its chief impact has always been the people. Through CERA I’ve been able to meet and work with assessment researchers from across the country, including some of my current collaborators. CERA has a lot to offer new and experienced researchers who want to be connected to research in assessment and evaluation in Canada, so I’m grateful for the opportunity to keep doing that.

6. If you are interested in connecting with Dr. Holden, please reach out by email:

mi.holden@uwinnipeg.ca