An Exploration And Practice On Formative Assessment In Higher Vocational School English Teaching

Educational evaluation is considered as an essential element in English languageteaching. A scientific and effective way of educational evaluation can promoteEnglish language teaching and learning. At present, there are two main ways in termsof educational evaluation: one is summative assessment, and the other is formativeassessment. The former uses the scores of final examinations as the main evidence toevaluate a student’s learning ability and academic achievements; while the latterworks on a student’ whole learning process, with an emphasis on effectivelymonitoring the students’ overall learning performance. In China, summativeassessment remains a dominant way of educational evaluation in English languageteaching for a long time, but it, to a large extent, pays little attention to students’initiative, autonomy and creativity in learning, going against students’ overalldevelopment. The new English Curriculum Standard (ECS) and College EnglishCurriculum Requirements (CECR) promulgated by the Ministry of Educationstipulate formative assessment should work as an important tool of evaluating astudent’s learning, promoting his learning efficiency. As a result, formativeassessment has gained the unprecedented attention among the domestic educationalfield.In1967, the term “formative assessment” was first introduced by M. Scriven,American expert on educational evaluation, in his great work “The Methodology ofEvaluation”; its theory was enriched and developed by B. S. Bloom et al., which hasbecome the core content of modern educational evaluation. Up to now, tremendousachievements have been made in terms of the theory and practice of formativeassessment, which is adequately demonstrated in the Western countries. The research into educational evaluation in China did not start until the1980s.Although it is true that the achievements in formative assessment have been made inChina, experimental research into formative assessment in the English course is farfrom enough, compared with many western countries; and its implementation ishardly seen in colleges or universities of China, especially in higher vocationalschools. The research attempts to apply formative assessment to the higher vocationalschool English teaching.This research is conducted by adopting such instruments as tests (before andafter the experiment), questionnaires (before and after the experiment) and theresearcher’s observations. The subjects participating in the study are80non-Englishmajor freshmen from two intact classes in Changchun Medical School, a highervocational school. The two classes are treated as the experimental class and controlclass respectively, with40students in each class. The formative assessment way ismainly adopted in the experimental class, while the summative-dominated assessmentway is applied in the control class. The length of the study covers12weeks. Throughthe respective comparison of the statistic results between the two tests and twoquestionnaires, a conclusion is drawn accordingly.The study aims to answer the following two questions:1. What is the adopted model of formative assessment?2. What effects does the adopted model of formative assessment have onstudents’ English academic performance?Based on the results of data analysis, we arrived at such a conclusion that theapplication of the formative assessment model did improve students’ academicperformance, which involves the three aspects: students’ academic achievements,learning initiative and learning autonomy.