形成性评估过程中出现的问题与策略

1、problems and strategies in formative assessmentabstract： as an important educational measurement, formative assessment reflects the whole learning process and aims at adjusting and improving the teaching and learning methods through providing teachers and students with immediate and effective feedba

2、ck. numerous studies on the theory and practice of formative assessment have been conducted both at home and abroad this paper expatiates on how to apply formative assessment in college foreign language teaching and learning effectively through introducing theories .concept and its edge over other f

3、orms of assessment, it also tries to present problems and strategies in teaching practice of our college key words: formative assessment; problems; strategies形成性评估过程中出现的问题与策略摘 要：形成性评估反映学牛学习全过程，通过及时、有效的反馈促使师牛不断地调整、 改进教学方法，提高教学成果，是教育评估重要手段。国内外对形成性评估的研究己取得相 当丰硕的成果。本文通过介绍形成性评估发展历史，概念，与其他评估方式的比较，形成性 评估的优

4、点，论述形成性评估在我校大学英语教学的口j行性，存在的问题并探讨应对策略， 阐述了如何有效地把形成性评估运川于人学英语教学。关键词：形成性评估；问题；策略contentsintroduction11.1 research puiposc11.2 research background11.2.1 research situation in western countries11.2.2 research situation in china42. what is formative assessment52.1 types of assessment52.2 the definition of

5、 formative assessment62.3 the characteristic of formative assessment62.4 the form of formative assessment73. problems and strategies in formative assessment93.1 the problems in formative assessment93.2 the strategies in formative assessment93.2.1 the frequency of testing93.2.2 how to measure formati

6、ve assessment103.2.3 how to guarantee the reliability of the implementation of formative assessment113.2.4 what proportionof fomiativc assessment and summativc assessment133.2.5 feedback of formativeassessment154 conclusion16bibliography20introductionli research purposeassessment is the indispensabl

7、e component of teaching. scientific assessment outcome not only provides instructive feedback to teachers, helps teachers to understand teaching effect, reform teaching methods and improve teaching quality, but also helps students to know their own learning situation, adjust learning methods and imp

8、rove learning efficiency. the current of test-based "accountability makes it seem as though all assessment could be reduced to "tough test" attached to high stakes.however, education assessment includes not only summative assessment which is often used in the form of standardized exam

9、ination, but also formative assessment which aims at learning and pays attention to the learning process(leung&mohan 2004;336). summative assessment is a very important means of checking the teaching achievement, but it can't evaluate the teaching process which is also a very important compo

10、nent. and formative assessment makes up for this deficiency. through various means and methods of formative assessment, both teachers and students can get feedback continually and check out what problems or difficulties they are faced in teaching and learning. if the primary purpose of assessment is

11、 to support high-quality learning (principle one in principles and indicators for student assessment systems), then formative assessment ought to be understood as the most important assessment practice however, in our country, it is rare a strategy either to study or to develop the formative assessm

12、ent during the process of teaching moreover, the problems of how to carry out the formative assessment in class has become one of the most heated discussions in the education field both at home and abroad. this paper attempts to list several problems in formative assessment and figure out strategies

13、 to solve them.3.2.2 research background2 research situation in western countriesfrederich taylor (1911) put forward the concept of education evaluation in his book the principle of science management for the first time. this concept which emphasized the significance of the examination which describ

14、ed learners' performance and progress at the end of a term lasted for about 20 years. in 1930 , ralph tyler , father of the modern education evaluation pointed out that the core of the assessment was evaluating whether the education objective was accomplished rather than distinguishing and selec

15、ting students affected by this concept, the object of the education assessment turned from personal ability to course management. but in 1960s-1970s summative assessment which paid attention to the result was the main assessment while formative assessment was just a subsidiary or suppiemen匸 in 1980s

16、 , many scholars began to pay attention to the distinction between summative assessment and formative assessment, such as bachman(1981)> pilliner(1982)> brown(1989) etc. bachman (1989; 245) thought that the difference between formative assessment and summative assessment was their different im

17、plementing purposes (the former one was course developing , the latter one was course effect) and times (the former one was in the process of teaching , while the latter one was after the teaching ) still, summative assessment was more popular and panegyrized than formative assessment. brown once co

18、ncluded: summative assessment was a better form of assessment. he also listed three positive influences of summative assessment. first, summative test applies to assess educational program, which cares about whether the whole project rather than several aspects of teaching is successful or unsuccess

19、ful; second, summative assessment enables us to evaluate the meaning of the achievement of a period to the whole educational process; third, summative assessment of a certain time of learning allows teachers or evaluators to have a clear understanding of the problems of the next stage. in fact, thes

20、e three merits already went beyond the category of summative assessment. in other words, the distinction of formative assessment and summative assessment is not definite, if we defined the time of summative assessment as stages during teaching process, but not the end of the teaching task and what&#

21、39;s more, make use of this assessment to guide and adjust the next teaching method, thus, summative assessment can be formative assessment in nature actually, formative assessment is made up of many staggered summative assessments.from the 1990s, more educators began to recognize that formative ass

22、essment had important impact on teaching. weir suggested teachers use formative assessment which could help them to adjust teaching tache and students9 learning behavior effectively. bachman&palmer(1996;98) discussed formative assessment from the view of examination. he emphasized that the exam

23、for formative assessment could help to guide students' learning and adjust teachers' teaching methods and materials while summative assessment only provided the result of students' learning and lacked the guidance of the teaching process. harlen&james(1997;369) insisted that the key

24、point of formative assessment was recognizing the gap between students9 present level and learning objectives.to meet the requirement of this research trend, a famous assessment magazine assessment in education discussed assessment and learning in class in its first edition. biggs, sebatane, dwyer,

25、black&william, hattie&jaeger respectively delivered their own viewpoints. among all of them, the most representative one was black&willianf s which included 250 articles and books from different countries. in their view, formative assessment was a kind of behavior that helped teacher and

26、 student to get feedback and guideline and the most distinctive distinction between formative assessment and summative assessment lay in the different effect on the teaching at the same time, they fully affirmed that formative assessment which provided students with feedback gradually and properly h

27、ad strong and positive effect on the teaching program. that is compared with other educational monitor instrument; systemized formative assessment can achieve more satisfying result.to draw a conclusion, from decades of the development of the educational assessment, formative assessment has been wid

28、ely studied by many western scholars and educators. it is gradually realized that summative test is just one part of educational evaluation, it can，t provide all-around and exact information to describe all aspects such as students' learning behavior, ability developing and course improving. mor

29、eover, it is universally recognized that formative assessment is the indispensable component of the effective learning and it provides teachers and students with beneficial and immediate feedback and achieve the educational goals.3 research situation in chinacompared with the heated discussion in we

30、stern countries, the research achievements in china are quite limited. sumniative examination has been the main means of testing and evaluation in college english teaching in china. the study of formative assessment domestically began very late. in 1988, beijing foreign language university did a sam

31、ple evaluating investigation of national college english major undergraduate course teaching through questionnaires and level testing from march to october, stressing the significance of attaching importance to educational assessment. however, the term of formative assessment wasn't put forward

32、clearly then. hu jinju and yan li explained the purposes and principles of formative assessment in detail in 2003 and 2005 respectively and discussed the particular methods and meaning of applying it to college english teaching. liu yuxin introduced the instruction and development of formative resea

33、rch on education design theory. wang hongyan and xie fang pointed out that the application of college english course teaching requirement (trial) contributed to changing the situation of using summative assessment simply in 2004 because this education requirement advocated to apply formative assessm

34、ent to college english teaching and insisted that it provided a positive environment to the development of college english teaching. whereas most of studies were restricted to the theory. positive research has drawn attention from many investigators in recent years. for example, zhou zhijian proved

35、in 2002 that the combination of summative and formative assessment could better arouse students9 interests and enthusiasm of english learning and improve their speaking english greatly. cao rongping conducted a tentative research model of teaching of english writing. he designed and implemented a te

36、n-week experimental project in an optional efl writing course attended by 177 non-english majors in a university of beijing, studying formative assessment influence on cultivating learners9 writing autonomy. besides, sheng xiangjun, zhou pingdi and qin xiubai studied the application of formative ass

37、essment in vocational college teaching and multimedia computer-assisted language learning respectively with satisfying results-thus it can be seen that up to now the application of formative assessment in our country is still in the groping stage and there are some defects in cognition and technique

38、s. although in recent years, formative assessment has drawn attention from more and more foreign language researchers, there is no tangible and systemic statement of implementing measurement of formative assessment. in order to make full use of formative assessment in teaching, learning and evaluati

39、ng, we should attempt to explore the application of formative assessment in language teaching actively. this is the very point from which my paper begins, hoping to contribute to this promising development.2 what is formative assessment3 types of assessmentsince seri ven put forward the distinction

40、of various assessment in his paper evaluation methodology in 1967, more and more researchers and educators pay attention to the characteristics of various types of assessment. among all types of assessment, three of them are mostly studied. they are diagnostic assessment, formative assessment and su

41、mmative assessment. for diagnostic assessment, though some authors delineate it as a component of formative assessment, in practice, the purpose of diagnostic assessment is to ascertain, prior to instruction, each student's strengths, weaknesses, knowledge and skills that permits the teacher to

42、remediate students and adjust the curriculum to meet each students unique needs. formative assessment occurs regularly throughout the instructional process and, according to the national center for fair and open testing (ncfot) (1999), it noccurs when teachers feed information back to the students i

43、n ways that enable the student to learn better, or when students can engage in a similar, self-reflective process'*. in its purest form, formative tests are not graded and are used as an ongoing diagnostic tool; hence, teachers employ the results of formative assessment solely to modify and adju

44、st his or her teaching practices to reflect the needs and progress of his or her students. for summative assessment, generally, it is a test, usually given at the end of a term, chapter, semester, year or the like, the purpose of which is evaluative. in addition, high-stakes tests such as gre, cet a

45、nd tem are also examples of summative assessment. these three assessments are different in the following four aspects:(1) purpose: diagnostic assessment aims at diagnosing and analyzing the current situation; formative assessment is to improve and perfect the teaching and learning; and summative ass

46、essment intends to provide reference to educational decision. (2) function: diagnostic assessment explores problems and then analyzes the reasons; formative assessment discovers and solves problems; and summative assessment makes general analysis of the results. (3) time: diagnostic assessment is pr

47、ior to the education activities; formative assessment is in the process of activities; and summative assessment is after the activities. (4) feedback: both diagnostic and formative assessment give feedback to evaluating object; and summative assessment gives feedback to decision-makers and education

48、al administrators.3 the definition of formative assessmentbefore discussing the implementing of formative assessment, it is very important to define the term "formative assessment. for many years of research, though various definitions have been put forward by many scholars and educators, those

49、 definitions are largely similar but with slight difference. among all those definitions of formative assessment, the most representative one is black & wiliam's: "assessment refers to all those activities undertaken by teachers, and by the students in assessing themselves, which provid

50、e information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged. such assessment becomes normative assessment1 when the evidence is actually used to adapt the teaching to meet the needs." (199& p. 2 inside the black box)to draw a conclusion, for

51、mative assessment is a process of giving feedback continually to both teachers and students to let them adjust their teaching and learning methods.3 the characteristic of formative assessmentas formative assessment does great help in teaching and learning, it is importantto figure out the characteri

52、stics of it and make full use of them. royce sadler (1989) identified three elements that are crucial to the effectiveness of formative assessment:helping students to recognize clearly the desired goal (understand what is required);providing students with evidence about how well their work matches t

53、hat goal;explaining ways to close the gap between the goal and their current performance terry crook summarized five elements of formative assessment, including:the identification by teachers and learners of learning goals, intentions or outcomes and criteria for achieving these.rich conversations b

54、etween teachers and students that continually build and go deeper.the provision of effective, timely feedback to enable students to advance their learning.the active involvement of students in their own learning.teachers responding to identified learning needs and strengths by modifying their teachi

55、ng approach (es).so while making formative assessment, what we should do is first, making sure that both teachers and students understand learning goals; second, developing a store of tactics or items which can be drawn upon to modify their own work; third, improving students9 abilities of self-asse

56、ssment; fourth, providing timely feedback which helps students to recognize their current state and further improvement; fifth, building confidence in them.3 the form of formative assessmentas to the research methods of formative assessment, discussion in western literature can be generally divided

57、into two aspects: one was that some scholars explained it in detail in the form of monograph or article for example, in 1994, 中国最大的论文知识平台weir&robert issued a book titled evaluation in el1 listing thirteen kinds of formative measurement including observation, diary, questioning, interview, litera

58、ture and data analyzing and self-assessment, etc, and he also analyzed the purpose, specific methods and implementing steps. in 2001, genesee&upshur published classroom-based evaluation in second language education, explaining assessing methods out of exam in particular, such as, observation in

59、class, students' record and diary, what's more, it also analyzed the function of these methods, i.e, observation in class and interview can reflect students9 language learning strategy; diary can show their learning attitude; curriculum record and teaching material can reflect educational system, etc.the other was that some scholars carried out experiments among students with different assessing methods. kan used some measurements including observation, interview, record, etc. to evaluate primary school students english learni