Abstract
It is generally accepted that formative assessment can better help students’ autonomous learning and their cultivation of humane quality. This paper intends to examine whether formative assessment is universally applicable for students of different levels of language proficiency. For this purpose, an English teaching experiment and a questionnaire survey on learning strategies and motivations were conducted in a 211 Project university and the independent college of that university in China. Research shows that learning strategies and motivations have a threshold effect on the implementation of formative assessment, and formative assessment is applicable for the students who have better command of English and higher learning strategies and motivations, but it does not work for those poor in English and having lower learning strategies and motivations. Therefore, formative assessment cannot completely replace summative assessment in college English teaching.
Highlights
Education assessment can be divided into formative assessment and summative assessment
The independent sample t-test to the final examination scores shows that there is significant difference between the experimental class and the control class in the economics department (p = 0.041 < 0.05), but there is no significant difference between the experimental class and the control class in the business administration department (p = 0.514 > 0.05), indicating that after a semester’s teaching experiment, formative assessment can improve the English proficiency of the students from the 211 Project university more effectively than summative assessment, but fails to improve the English proficiency of the students from the independent college
Through reflections on the process of the teaching experiment and analyses of the questionnaires for the learning strategies and motivations and for the formative assessment, we find three factors affecting the implementation of formative assessment: the students’ learning motivations, the assessment quality and the teacher’s professional ability
Summary
Education assessment can be divided into formative assessment and summative assessment. The former is “assessment for learning” (William, 2011). It supports teachers and students in decision-making during the educational and learning processes. The latter, “occurs at the end of a learning unit and determines if the content being taught was retained” The subjects of the summative assessment are the teachers or the educational institutions, and it mainly functions to evaluate and identify the
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