Balancing Formative Assessment Against Summative Assessment In English Writing Class ——Insights From Postgraduate Students

The past two decades have seen formative assessment,a new emergent assessment theory,introduced into every level of education and many disciplines in China.Despite the embrace of formative assessment discourse at the policy level,its inroads into an assessment system that is deeply-rooted with an examination tradition and entrenched with values for testing-orientation are by no means easy-going.While tensions and conflicts are expected,those who stand in this changing wave are sure to be found struggling to balance between the two totally different assessments.This thesis aims to explore how students manage to balance the two and excel in their English as a Foreign Language（EFL）writing class.The investigation into students’ experience of this innovative movement is potentially valuable,because it is the students who are the targeted beneficiary and centered figure in it,decide how this innovation will finally end up and where it will lead.Particularly,this study will focus on students’ cognition,attitude and behavior in this assessment change.That is,this paper will go beyond how they respond to and cope with the change and try to link their responses to the reasons lying behind,like how they take it cognitively and emotionally.Given that few research has been conducted in this regard,this study will try to fill in the gap with insights from postgraduate students and their EFL writing from a first-tier university in Mid-western province.This study adopts a mixed method.Specifically,it uses both-a qualitative interview of ten students of four focus groups and a quantitative questionnaire of 228 students,to address the following four questions:1)How do students perceive the incorporated formative and the original summative elements of the assessment framework?2)How do students feel about the formative and the summative assessment?3)How do students balance the formative assessment with the summative assessment?4)What factors are influencing students’ reactions towards assessment?Analysis of the collected data reveals: firstly,students’ perceptions of the formative feedback are rather complex: they tend to perceive the feedback from the pigai.org as mechanical with limited usefulness,the feedback from teachers as helpful,and the few feedback from peers as useful in limited ways.As to the score-a summative element,students perceive it as important but unreliable.Secondly,students hold a mixed feeling towards the assessment framework.To the formative feedback,that is,feedback from the pigai.org,teachers and peers,students hold a positive feeling at the beginning,which,however,is changeable according to the score.That is,the feeling becomes negative or positive with the summative score’s being low or high.To the summative score,students always hold a negative feeling towards it.Thirdly,students incline to favor whatever ways leading to a high score;yet,they also like to take in both the formative feedback（for learning）and the summative score（of learning）when they don’t need to make a choice.Fourthly,the need to raise the score,the need to improve writing ability,students’ English proficiency level and time schedule are all among the factors influencing students’ responses to the assessment framework.In fact,the score permeates the whole assessment process and dominates students’ responses towards the assessment.It thus can be said,the summative assessment culture embedded in Chinese educational system and tradition still controls students and their experience of the assessment changes including this one,and there is still a long way to go before its potential can be fully realized in this context.