Traditional or Alternative: A Comparative Study on the Effect of Assessment on Learning Retention and Retrieval

Recently, the concept of technology-based teaching and learning has become a popular subject in many educational fields such as assessment. Tremendous changes have emerged in the field of education that have entirely changed the facet of traditional system of education. It is inevitable that in line with these tremendous changes over the last decades new terms and concepts are also introduced. One of them is Alternative assessment which is considered as the utilization of non-traditional approaches in determining students' performance. This study was designed to make a comparison between traditional and alternative methods of assessment and examining their effect on learning process. E-portfolio application was chosen as the alternative method of assessment. In this quasi-experimental research that was carried out in an Iranian context with 54 female EFL learners, the participants of our control and experimental groups were chosen according to a questionnaire by purposeful non-random sampling method. Analyzing the scores of this study revealed the significant superiority of alternative method of assessment over its counterpart traditional one. The results also showed that self-assessment and self-evaluation as the result of alternative assessment leads to meaningful learning that had statistically significant effect on long-term retention and retrieval of learning. So, it is inferable that active involvement of learners in the assessment of their own performance and the development of reflective thinking improve learning.

کلیدواژه ها:

Traditional assessment ، Alternative assessment ، e-portfolio ، Self-assessment ، Retention