The effect of formative assessment on the Iranian ESP university students’ achievements of vocabulary learning in General English courses

Formative assessment is the pervasive technique used in learner-cantered programs to evaluate students’ achievements of course objectives. Despite the process-oriented nature of this evaluative technique, itsapplication has been contentious at undergraduate and graduate levels. The present study sets out to investigatethe effect of formative assessment on Iranian university undergraduate students’ achievement of vocabularylearning in general English courses. The participants in the study included 40 male and female students in two intact classes who were randomly assigned as the experimental and control groups. The initial homogeneity ofthe participants was assessed via t-test analysis of their scores on a vocabulary pre-test. During the five-weektreatment, then, the Retroactive Regulation procedure of formative assessment was applied every session in theexperimental group. The findings based on a sample t-test analysis of the post-test scores revealed that the experimental groups outperformed the control group and achieved significantly higher scores on the parallel vocabulary post-test. The findings underscore the facilitative impact of formative assessment and have pedagogical implications.

کلیدواژه ها:

formative assessment ، vocabulary learning ، Retroactive Regulation ، General English