An Experimental Study On The Application Of Formative Assessment To Nursing English Teaching In Higher Vocational College

Education evaluation is an important link in English teaching procedure. Comprehensive and scientific evaluation system plays an important role in achieving the teaching goals and improving the education quality. Unfortunately, the traditional summative assessment still occupies the leading position. Generally the students in higher vocational schools lack learning initiative and enthusiasm. They haven’t formed good learning habits. Under such circumstances, it is not conducive for nursing personnel to develop their overall qualities. With the great shortage of skilled nurses throughout the world, English teaching should be strengthened to effectively improve the nursing students’ English level and their learning ability. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce formative assessment in nursing English teaching.Based on the current situation of higher vocational nursing learning and teaching, formative assessment is applied to nursing English teaching in this study. It aims to answer three questions:(1) Can formative assessment improve the learning strategies of nursing students in higher vocational schools?(2) Can formative assessment develop good learning habits in English learning?(3) Can formative assessment improve students’ nursing English proficiency? The experimental subjects, two parallel first year Nursing classes with 122 students are chosen from one medical college which is a higher vocational school. One class(62) is treated as the experimental class and the other one(60) is the control class. During the 16 weeks’ experiment, formative assessment is implemented in experimental class while summative assessment is applied in the control class. The research instruments which are applied in the experimental class include questionnaires, interviews, portfolios and tests. After the experiment, the data of two tests and two questionnaires is analyzed by SPSS 18.0 while the data from interviews and portfolios is made qualitative analysis. At last, detailed analysis and discussion are conducted on the effectiveness in the application of formative assessment in nursing English teaching.After the comparison and analysis of the respective statistic results between the two tests and two questionnaires, a conclusion is drawn accordingly. Formative assessment improves students’ English learning strategies and effectively develops their learning habits. Formative assessment also improves the students’ English proficiency. So the application of formative assessment in higher vocational nursing English is beneficial to their English learning ability, which set a solid foundation for their future career.The major findings of the experiment reveal that it has greatly practical significance to apply formative assessment in nursing English teaching in higher vocational college. However, it is better to combine formative assessment with other evaluation approaches in the process of teaching, which requires both the teachers and students to possess higher operational competence in the application of formative assessment.