An Investigation Into The Application Of Formative Assessment In Senior High School English Writing

Assessment is an important part in the process of teaching and learning, because it provides feedbacks for both teachers and students. However, summative assessment has played a very important part in the assessment of students’writings for so long time. In summative assessment, students don’t know what the real levels of their writings are. They don’t know what the strengths and weaknesses are in their writings, either. And they also have no idea about how to improve them. What they know is the scores under their writings given by teachers and the mistakes corrected by the teachers in their writings. It was put forward in the New Curriculum Reform that formative assessment was an important part in English teaching. It was also pointed out in the New Curriculum Standard that formative assessment could change the students from passive accepters to positive participants (the New Curriculum Standard,2003).By reading related literatures both at home and abroad, it can be seen that formative assessment has got wide attention. A lot of scholars do researches on the characteristics of formative assessment, the differences between summative assessment and formative assessment and the advantages of formative assessment. This thesis aims to do an investigation about whether the application of formative assessment can improve the participants’ writing achievements and whether the application of formative assessment can change the participants’ attitudes toward English writing. This investigation is based on the author’s teaching practice in Sha Ya NO.2 Middle School. And there were 100 participants from two classes of Senior Grade Two taking part in this investigation. The author learned about the participants’ attitudes toward English writing and their writing levels by giving a pre-questionnaire and a pre-test, then the author applied formative assessment in the experiment with the purpose of investigating whether the application of formative assessment can improve the participants’ English writing achievements and whether the participants’ attitudes toward English writing have also got changed. This thesis aims to answer the following two questions: 1. What is the effect of formative assessment on the participants’ writingachievements? 2. What is the influence of formative assessment on the participants’writing attitudes?In order to give answers to these two questions and make the results more reliable, the author used different research methods, such as pre-questionnaire, pretest, post test, post questionnaire and an interview. SPSS 17.0 was used to give analysis about the statistics from questionnaires and writing tests, while the analysis of the interview is mainly qualitative.The findings of this investigation show that most of the participants’ writing achievements have been improved and their attitudes toward English writing have been also changed after the application of formative assessment in Senior High School English writing.