Effects Of Formative Assessment In Individualized English Learning On Autonomous Learning

It has already been a well accepted fact from the literature that formative assessment motivates, monitors, and modifies students'learning process. The relationships between formative assessment and other approaches have been widely investigated during the past years, however, it is still an innovation to research the effects of formative assessment on autonomous learning under the individualized instruction as the teaching and learning environment.Based on a half year experimental course named Individualized English Learning in Nankai University, a research group (including 1 teacher and 2 teaching assistants), and 26 English majors as subjects participated in this research, which was conducted to explore the effect of formative assessment in IEL on autonomous learning. Students enjoyed high levels of autonomy in determining interests, learning plans, learning materials, and learning methods in and outside of classroom. The teacher intervened their learning by such formative assessment instruments as feedbacks, learning records, monthly reflections, presentations, discussion, interviews, questionnaires and etc. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected during the research procedure.According to data analysis, the research findings include:(1) students'reported results of input, output, critical thinking activities, time investment, and self-assessment; (2) students'linguistic achievements and non-linguistic achievements; (3) students'difficulties and problems in IEL; (4) impacts of formative assessment on determining the interests and making plans, problem-solving, motivation, creativity, and correction.Expect for the research findings, there are also research limitations, such as short intervention time, data limitation, and inadequate interviews, etc.