Problems And Strategies In Formative AssessmentAbstract:A s 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 feedback. 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 forms 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：形成性评估反映学生学习全过程, 通过及时、有效的反馈促使师生不断地调整、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已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，形成性评估的优点，论述形成性评估在我校大学英语教学的可行性，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用于大学英语教学。
关键词：形成性评估；问题；策略CONTENTSIntroduction (1)1.1 Research purpose (1)1.2 Research background (1)1.2.1 Research situation in western countries (1)1.2.2 Research situation in China (4)2．What is formative assessment (5)2.1 Types of assessment (5)2.2 The definition of formative assessment (6)2.3 The characteristic of formative assessment (6)2.4 The form of formative assessment (7)3. Problems and strategies in formative assessment (9)3.1 The problems in formative assessment (9)3.2 The strategies in formative assessment (9)3.2.1 The frequency of testing (9)3.2.2 How to measure formative assessment (10)3.2.3 How to guarantee the reliability of the implementation of formative assessment (11)3.2.4 What proportion of formative assessment and summative assessment (13)3.2.5 Feedback of formative assessment (15)4. Conclusion (16)Bibliography (20)Introduction1.1 Research purposeAssessment is the indispensable 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 improve 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 examination, 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 a lso a very important component. 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 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 assessment 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 to solve them.1.2 Research background1.2.1 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 whichemphasized the significance of the examination which described 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 selecting 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 supplement. In 1980s , 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 implementing 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 concluded: 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 unsuccessful; 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, these 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 w hat’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 assessment had important impact on teaching. Weir suggested teachers use formative assessment which could help them to adjust teaching tache and students’ learning behavior effectively. Bachman&Palmer(1996;98) discussed formative assessment from the view of examination. He emphasized that the exam for formative assessment could help to guide students’ learning and adjust teachers’ teaching methods and materials while summative assessment only provided the resu lt of students’ learning and lacked the guidance of the teaching process. Harlen&James(1997;369) insisted that the key point of formative assessment was recognizing the gap between students’ 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, Black&William, Hattie&Jaeger respectively delivered their own viewpoints. Among all of them, the most representative one was Black&William’s which included250 articles and books from different countries. In their view, formative assessment was a kind of behavior that helped teacher and 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 had 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 widely 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 su ch as students’ learning behavior, ability developing and course improving. Moreover, it is universally recognized that formative assessment is the indispensable component of the effective learning and it provides teachers and students withbeneficial and immediate feedback and achieve the educational goals.1.2.2 Research situation in ChinaCompared with the heated discussion in western countries, the research achievements in China are quite limited. Summative 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 sample 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 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 research 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 assessment 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 in 2002 that the combination of summative and formative assessment could better arouse students’ interests and enthusiasm of English learning and improve their spe aking English greatly. Cao Rongping conducted a tentative research model of teaching of English writing. He designed and implemented a ten-week experimental project in an optional EFL writing course attended by 177 non-English majors in a university of Bei jing, studying formative assessment’s influence on cultivating learners’ writing autonomy. Besides, Sheng Xiangjun, Zhou Pingdi and Qin Xiubai studied the application of formative assessment 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 techniques. 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 evaluating, 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 assessment2.1 Types of assessmentSince Scriven put forward the distinction 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 summative 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 remediate students and adjust the curriculum to meet each student’s unique needs. Formative assessment occurs regularly throughout the instructional process and, according to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (NCFOT) (1999), it "occurs when teachers feed information back to the students in 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 adjust his or her teaching practices to reflect the needs and progress of his or her students. Forsummative 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 and 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 assessment 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 prior 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 educational administrators.2.2 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 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 provide information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged. Such assessment becomes 'formative assessment' when the evidence is actually used to adapt the teaching to meet the needs.”(1998, p. 2 Inside the Black Box)To draw a conclusion, formative assessment is a process of giving feedback continually to both teachers and students to let them adjust their teaching and learning methods.2.3 The characteristic of formative assessmentAs formative assessment does great help in teaching and learning, it is importantto figure out the characteristics 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 that 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 between 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 teaching 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 students’ abil ities of self-assessment; fourth, providing timely feedback which helps students to recognize their current state and further improvement; fifth, building confidence in them.2.4 The form of formative assessmentAs to the research methods of formative assessment, discussion in western literature can be generally divided into two aspects: one was that some scholars explained it in detail in the form of monograph or article. For example, in 1994,Weir&Robert issued a book titled Evaluation in ELT, listing thirteen kinds of formative measurement including observation, diary, questioning, interview, literature 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 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 students’ 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 learning as the second language in China Town, Los Angeles in 1969. Lynch (2001) summarized the evaluating approach of different scholars. Such as, Marottoli (1973) evaluated a private school’s educational program through observation; McClean assessed the bilingual teaching project in Ontario, Canada by analyzing the data of interview and stude nts’ diaries. Keig (2000) organized an investigation in every college of a university for art to find out their attitude to the four formative assessment methods (observation in class, class kinescoping, subject material assessment and learning material assessment). The result showed that most of them expressed their willingness of using these methods because these methods can have positive influence on education. From all these experiments, we also can find that assessing measurement and purpose are closely related different assessing measurements for different assessing purposes.In this paper, observation, questionnaire, self-assessment, peer assessment and group activities are involved and evaluating items are various, including final test, mid-semester test, everyday study which consists of reciting text, unit test, listening test, performance in class and homework, and oral test. And all of these approachesachieve a lot in promoting the execution of formative assessment, increasing students’ interests in learning and teachers’ enthusiasm in teaching and improving their work.3. Problems and strategies in formative assessment3.1 The problems in formative assessmentIn 2004, an experiment of formative assessment was carried out by our foreign language college among 2000 non-English major freshmen. Through two years’ teaching practice, we find that the following questions are worth discussing when formative assessment is practiced. They are:1.What is proper frequency of testing;2.How to measure formative assessment ;3.How to guarantee reliability during the process of unit testing;4.In what proportion of formative assessment and summative assessment is proper;5.How to give feedback.3.2 The strategies in formative assessment3.2.1 The frequency of testingAccording to The National Center for Fair and Open Testing (NCFOT) (1999), formative assessment should be carried through periodically through out the process of teaching from beginning to end. And to the frequency of testing, Black and William believed that, “It is better to have frequent short tests than infrequent long ones. Any new learning should first be tested within about a week of a first encounter, but more frequent tests are counterproductive. Students’ paper file and homework all can be the assess ment material.” However, in practice, it is impossible to implement a test once a week, because students resent over-assessment which often occurs across their courses. Large amounts of assessment also take their toll on staff, especially in terms of setting and marking the test paper. In our college, two thousand students take part in thisexperiment, it needs at least 2000 yuan including the cost of setting and invigilating every test. At the beginning, we tested once a unit and had listening test once in three weeks. But we found that students were revolt against over-assessment and it didn’t help in monitoring and inspecting their learning. Through practice and students’ feedback, we finally find that the following arrangements are accepted by both students and teachers：in every term, a perusal test every two units, two listening tests, one translation practice every unit, two compositions, one written test and one oral test at the end of the semester.3.2.2 How to measure formative assessmentAccording to Black and William’s theory about formative assessment, the teacher should prepare thoughtful questions to let students discuss in class, but not mark their papers. Yet for many years, we are used to evaluating students’ learning by scores and marks in China because it is hard for teachers to evaluate every student by their performance in class. Therefore, pure formative assessment is rarely put into practice (Brookhart 1999). In this case, students’ self-assessment and peer-assessment might be of great help, but they lack reliability. Littlewood (1999:71-74) indicates in his research that students in eastern Asia respect their teachers' authority and expect their teachers to be responsible for their learning assessment. Liu Kuanpin and other researchers a re worried about the effectiveness of students’ self-assessment and feedback for the reason that low achievers are incapable of evaluating themselves and their classmates or would do it artificially instead of doing it factually. We also do self-assessment in our college, asking students to score themselves (the total sore is ten). The following is the result of their self-assessment of four classes:9 8.5 8 7.5 7 6.5 62 3 8 5 5 1 0Class124 stu.Class22 4 8 53 1 225 stu.2 3 9 5 4 0 0Class323 stu.Class4 3 3 9 2 10 0 027 stu.Though most of students’ self-assessments are objective, they just go between. It can be seen in the table that the majority choose 7 to 8.5 and the result can not be reported to their parents and be kept in the arc hives because students’ self-assessment is lacking of authority. Teachers should just consider such assessment as reference and let students know their own aims, reconsider their own learning and have a clear understanding of their own advantages and disadvantages. When we asked students to assess each other in group activities, they found that it was hard to follow the evaluating standard and on the other hand, they are unwilling to give the exact score to their classmates considering their friendship. Therefore, according to the characteristics of Chinese Education, only the combination of score and performance in class and self-assessment can make the reasonable assessment feasible.3.2.3 How to guarantee the reliability of the implementation of formative assessmentA good paper that can reflect the students’ learning situation objectively and make students feel that unit tests are reliable, valid and authoritative as final examination is the key premise of formative assessment. Thus, what kind of test is more reliable and valid? A test must include both subjective items and objective items, the former one tests the productivity which has higher validity and has more positive effect on teaching, the latter one which is in the form of multiple-choice has higher reliability and is more feasible. Neither the pure subjective test nor the pure objective test is the best test or the best means of testing. Any test must be balanced in validity, reliability, feasibility and promotion in teaching. (Foreign Circles 2002:6). At the very beginning, we tried to let students feel that they could gain good results through their effort easily, so we set simple questions such as translating Chinese phrases into English or English phrases into Chinese, multiple-choice and reading comprehension related to CET-4. However, these questions were too easy to check up students’ real mastery of their learning, just as Black and William pointed out that tests should avoid such questions like urging them to learn superficially. In order to check students’ mastery of the usage of vocabulary: we changed it to another form: fill in the blanks with the words givenbelow (ten blanks with eleven to twelve words to fill in) and translate five sentences (subjective test), one reading comprehension (multiple-choice, objective test). In unit testing, feasibility is another fact of language testing. A test can only be feasible under the acceptance of manpower and material resources. In order to reduce costs, we replace large-scale testing which lets all students take part in at the same time with testing in each individual class with the time limit 20 minutes. Though testing in class is easily carried out, it still has problems. One is that every teacher invigilates his/her own class and the strictness can vary; the other is that every class has classes at a different time, so does the test time and that will cause leakage of the paper. To solve this problem, we make four sets of papers with different questions except perusal and listening of every unit to make sure that the papers are different in different class times. We also prepare thirty different sets of oral test papers with three parts: reading new words; reading a short passage of the text and talking under the given topic ( in general, there are 30 students in class, we will make sure that every student has different papers except for some parts of the topic). Now the problem of paper leakage is solved, but how to ensure that every paper has similar reliability and validity? For example, fill in the blanks with the words given below, we basically ensure that there are ten same key words in every paper, and there can be the same words, but they are in different sentences; the translation can be handled in the same way, every sentence including two main phrases; so does filling in the blanks. It should be the same case with listening test, it should include the same quantity of hard and easy words, phrases and sentences. There was a failure in the past, one was the reading test, students of higher-level had worse result than students of lower-level because of the different difficulties of two sets of papers; the other time was the listening test, teachers often complained about the different difficulties among papers. Its main reason was that the listening material was restricted by the recording material, so it is hard to ensure the same reliability and validity of each paper. The key point of solving this problem is proposition, before deciding to adapt paper; we should ask colleagues to do the test papers seriously to confirm that they have a similar standard. Withal, Black and。
