A brief introduction of the assessment.doc

outlinei. introduction ii. what is formative assessment a. a brief introduction of the assessment speaking of “assessment”,we may think of words like test or score . in fact ,that belongs to summative assessment . but there is a better assessment system .-formative assessment .search it in internet ,youll get many kinds of definition . but black and wiliam are acknowledged to give the most authoritative definition . they observe that the term formative assessment does not have a tightly defined and widely accepted meaning. all those activities undertaken by teachers, and/or by students, which provide information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged.4 along similar lines, cowie and bell5 define formative assessment as the process used by teachers and students to recognise and respond to student learning in order to enhance that learning, during the learning. nicol and macfarlane-dick, who emphases the role students can play in producing formative assessments state that formative assessment aids learning by generating feedback information that is of benefit to students and to teachers. feedback on performance, in class or on assignments, enables students to restructure their understanding/skills and build more powerful ideas and capabilities.6 it was michael scriven who created the terms formative assessment in 1967, and emphasized their differences both in terms of the goals of seeking and using information in a given period . for scriven, formative evaluation gathered information to evaluate the effectiveness of a curriculum and guide school system choices as to which curriculum to adopt and how to improve it.8 benjamin bloom took up the term in 1968 in the book learning for mastery to consider formative assessment as a tool for improving the teaching-learning process for students.10 his subsequent 1971 book handbook of formative and summative evaluation, written with thomas hasting and george madaus, showed how formative assessments could be linked to instructional units in a variety of content areas.11 it is this approach that reflects the generally accepted meaning of the term today.12 for both scriven and bloom, an assessment, whatever its other uses, is only formative if it is used to alter subsequent educational decisions.8 subsequently, however, black and wiliam have suggested this definition is too restrictive, since formative assessments may be used to provide evidence that the intended course of action was indeed appropriate. they propose that: practice in a classroom is formative to the extent that evidence about student achievement is elicited, interpreted, and used by teachers, learners, or their peers, to make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded, than the decisions they would have taken in the absence of the evidence that was elicited.b.the development of formative assessment in the foreign countries the famous scholars p. black and d. william who are specialize in formative assessment think :in a broad sense ,formative assessment includes all the activities teacher and students can do to collecting learning information ,which could adjust teaching and learning diagnostically （black and william, 1998）. and then ,carol boston cited that this diagnostic use of assessment to provide feedback to teachers and students over the course of instruction is called formative assessment. that gives a new and comprehensive definition of formative assessment(boston, 2002 ).as early as in twentieth century 80s,formative assessment has been studied and implemented . at the same time ,government pay highly attention to it ,giving strongly imburse and committing many experts in it . a typical research result was from the assessment reform group, arp uk.they give the “ten principles of assessment for learning”.many countries have established evaluation research center in many higher schools which play a scientific research task, especially in the field of language testing in a more advanced position of england. for instance ,university of manchester has the center for formative assessment and university of bristol has the center for assessment studies.the assessment reform group, arp uk has announced the “ten concepts of assessment for learning” in march 2002. formative assessment is typically contrasted with summative assessment. the former make teachers and students in decision-making during teaching and learning processes, however the latter happens at the end of a learning unit and determines if the content being taught was retained. (ainsworth p. 23 2006)7 the key point of formative assessment is how the information is used, rather than the format of assessment . the same test may act as either formative or summative. however, some methods of assessment are better suited to one or the other purpose.8 the development of formative assessment in china domestic english formative evaluation started a bit late ,but most of the attention is on the primary and secondary schools. despite research on university english formative assessment is less ,they also made a lot of achievements. hujinju and yanli give a detailed explanation about the objectives and principles of formative assessment . chenqiuxian introduced the formative assessment in chinese principles, policies and implementation.we are exciting to see that china has also set up the “chinese scientific evaluation research center”. its in wuhan university ,although at primary stage , it marks china has started to envisage the feedback to teaching and research. college english curriculum requirements published by the ministry of education in january,2004determines the nature of college english teaching course as a component of higher education and a compulsory subject for college course .why should we take formative assessment in college english teachingtraditional and current assessment system in china china has the worlds largest education system. according to the 2003 statistics on school and university enrollment from the ministry of education (moe) in china, there are 247,365,300 children and young people in kindergarten, schools and universities. each of the school levels in china are the size of the full population of many countries. the following are the 2003 statistics from the moe official website1.the disadvantages of summative assessment in “examnation -oriented education”this makes reform particularly difficult despite the centralized education system. this educational system was reorganized first in 1984 and then in 1993 and the ministry of education was renamed the state education commission. according to wang (1994) with the implementation of universal 9 years of compulsory education, the improvement of educational quality and standards became a new focus of attention in china. the national monitoring system was just taking shape in the 1980s. assessment was seen to serve the development of moral, intellectual and physical ability. public examinations at primary level were cancelled. in the government document2, school based assessment was re-emphasized and encouraged to play an important role in controlling and improving the quality of student learning. however, schools and local authorities did not follow this policy until the recent reformin order to better understand the assessment policy implementation issues, a closer look will be taken at guangzhou, a city in one of the provinces of china, to see the steps china has made towards reforming the assessment system in recent years. the ongoing processes of globalization have had significant implications for functional and territorial organization and reorganization of human activities in different world regions. china too is moving to reform curriculum and assessment. (lin, 2003)before the curriculum reform, it was the case that, for almost all teachers, principals and government officers throughout china, student evaluation or assessment was simply viewed as examinations and tests (gao, 2002). students needed to pass numerous after-class-tests, module tests, mid-term tests, term tests, year tests, graduation tests and two important public examinations: the senior secondary entrance exams and university entrance exams during his/her school years. all the mid-term tests, term tests and year tests were organized externally and students were ranked according to their scores in these tests beginning in their first year of primary schooling. students scores in these tests also affected their teachers income in almost all schools, the distribution of a bonus (a part of teachers incomes in china) among teachers was based on their students achievement in tests and examinations. parents and the society also valued the exam scores and took it as the most important measure of the quality of a school. this pushed teachers and students into an exam-orientated style of teaching and learning (liu, 1995). tests and examinations were viewed as “a baton conducting teachers, students and the teaching-learning process” (gao & watkins, 2001). however, these examinations focused only on the quantitative aspect of student learning outcomes, used surface exam techniques, mostly, pen-and-paper tests which only measured the quantity of knowledge and lower level objectives of learning (gao, 2003). the quality of, and approaches to, learning as well as attitude and value of students towards learning were neglected. evaluation, in this way, became an obstacle to the improvement of the quality of teaching and learning as well as school curriculum in the past decades. with the adoption of the new national curriculum, reform of student assessment became urgent (gao, 2002).because student assessment in china has been heavily externalized and competitive, over emphasising quantitative outcomes and uniform standards, and did not take into account the diversity of students and, neglected the right and role of students, the moe decided to change student assessment towards more “diversification/loosening”, similar to the direction of assessment reform in korea and japan (lee, 2000). this movement was described in the guide lines for curriculum reform in basic education (experimental draft) (moe, 2001), which was the key to assessment reform. it described the reconstruction of a so-called “developmental assessment system” that “focuses on all aspects of learning, uses variety of techniques, and pays more attention to how students progressing their learning(moe, 2003a)”. the guidelines also state that with the new assessment strategy we need to: “build up a new evaluation system aimed at facilitating students whole development. it will not only assess students achievement, but also discover and develop students potential in various ways, identify their needs in development, help them to develop their self-understanding and self-confidences. evaluation needs to play its role in educating and facilitate students development.” (moe, 2001, guide line no.14)the necessity of take a new evaluation system in college english teaching how do we apply the formative assessment in college english teachingchange teachers sense about english teaching in chinese conventional education ,teachers play roles as leaders ,instructors:they just “pour their knowledge into students brain” . that is unsuitable for chinese development . in 2001 the ministry of education promulgated the english curriculum standard (experiment draft) pointed out : the evaluation system ,on the one hand ,should reflect the pluralistic evaluate subjects and diversity evaluate methods ,on the other hand should pay attention to the process about the development of students comprehensive language use ability and the effect of learning. combining the formative assessment with summative assessment, not only focus on results, but also on the process, to achieve the harmonious unification of learning process and evaluation of learning results. there is no doubt that the teacher plays an important role in the formative evaluation . therefore ,in formative assessment ,teacher should become trainer and booster.teacher should tell the results of assessment to many people, including students, parents, schools and even teaching policy makers. the evaluation results in addition to providing teaching information, also rise the function of explaining, illustrating , and even providing basis for decision making . because the purpose of diversity, so teachers need to play different roles in different evaluation mode. formative evaluation is designed for grasping the learning information of students in the learning process, making corresponding adjust to the teaching and learning strategies, so as to promote students learning and instruct teachers to improve the teaching plan. therefore, the role of teachers in the formative evaluation is very significant (gao jing ,2008) .1.1 change in conception conception changing is a fundamental problem of setting the new evaluation system . in order to implement the formative evaluation effectively , teachers should set up the ideology: 1.2change the relationship between examination and learning motivation in the traditional idea the majority of students learning motivation is to score high, many teachers think that the pressure of the exam will improve the students efforts, improve score.1.3 to believe that all students have the learning potentialfor a long time, the evaluation of learning is mainly judged by teachers. more often than not teachers measure students learning level on test scores. this assessment which only depend on scores just affirmed the minority students but ignored the majority students . whats worse ,teachers give few chances to let students know themselves . so ,its har