New Forms of Assessment: Incorporating EFL Reading and Writing Students’ Contributions | ||
| CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education | ||
| Article 11, Volume 67, Issue 1, July 2019, Pages 307-326 PDF (508.33 K) | ||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/opde.2019.133837 | ||
| Author | ||
| Safaa A. Eissa Eissa | ||
| Abstract | ||
| Assessment has witnessed drastic changes in the last decade. However, depending only on the summative assessment might not help in reaching the ultimate goals of enhancing students’ learning and improving instructors’ teaching. Besides, having the instructor as the only assessor in the classroom might hinder personalized learning. Accordingly, the present study aims at investigating the effect of implementing new forms of formative assessment on enhancing EFL freshman students’ reading and writing skills. The study was conducted in a private Saudi university during the academic years 2016 – 2017 and 2017 – 2018. Fifty-two EFL students enrolled in a reading and writing course and randomly assigned to an experimental and a control group participated in the study. The suggested assessment strategy focused on encouraging students to contribute to their learning instead of collecting evidence for their instructor by participating in tests generation, scoring rubrics design and reflection learning logs. A list of dynamic tasks was created in collaboration with students who took the full responsibility of teaching each other. Weekly expert students were assigned to contribute to the learning and teaching of other groups while the instructor's main job was only to facilitate the whole process. Instruments of the study included a pre-post reading and writing test, semi-structured interviews and students’ reflection learning logs where their opinions regarding their learning were constructively measured. Findings proved that students’ high performance was in favour of the items they constructed. Test item writing increased their sense of being responsible for their academic achievement. Their endeavours to produce test items kept them well informed of the specific details of the syllabus and increased their analytical skills. Students had a highly positive attitude towards their participation in test construction. A list of recommendations with the possible drawbacks of learning-oriented assessment were considered as well | ||
| Keywords | ||
| Formative Assessment - Rubrics; Expert student; Reflective learning logs | ||
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