An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of Formative Assessment On Students' Learning Autonomy In The Junior High School

Assessment is an important part of English teaching. Current assessment practice applied to English teaching in Junior high schools are summative dominated by standardized tests, which leads to teaching only for testing, not teaching for learning, the goal of assessment. The newly promulgated ordinary Junior High School English Curriculum Criterion formulated by the Ministry of Education in 2002 points out teachers should pay attention to training and stimulating students' interest and learning motivation. They should enable students to build confidence, develop good study habits and form the effective study strategies, develop independent learning skills and the spirit of cooperation.Summative assessment values result more important than process, knowledge more important than quality. This kind of assessment overemphasizes the importance of the score, but neglects students' study process and progress which they have made. Many students feel anxious and inferior because they pay more attention to the results of the exam, and it is not good for cultivating their self—confidence, and has affected learner autonomy development. Only depending on changing teaching method to change the students'passive study manners is not enough. The pressure of examinations can't make students truly become masters of learning. Luckily, the learner-centered formative assessment is a solution to some problems existed in current English teaching. It can overcome the negative effects which are under the exam-oriented education system in the summative assessment. Through the use of formative assessment can transform summative assessment to formative assessment, and it's good for cultivating students' study manners and autonomous study.The study selected 80 subjects randomly. They were from two parallel classes taught by the same English teacher. One was the experimental class and the other was the control class. The experimental class was taught by using formative assessment, aimed at promoting students' autonomous study while the control class was taught by using traditional assessment. In the experimental period, the author mainly uses questionnaires, pre-test and post-test and assessment scales to collect data. Both quantitative and qualitative research approaches were adopted in this study. Statistical Package for Social Science (Spss16.0) was employed to do a T-test about the data. Results of Sample T-test of students' pre-test and post-test scores did show a significant difference between experimental class and control class, it revealed that formative assessment could significantly promote students' learner autonomy. The students in the experimental class displayed an awareness of learning goals, learning outcomes and the action to be taken, which was a sign of strong learner autonomy.At last, the study makes suggestions for future research.