The impact of formative assessment on student achievement in a given Armenian high school

Abstract

Assessment in Armenian schools merely concentrates on giving grades to students according to daily tasks and their test results, without providing learners with relevant feedback. This is because schools in Armenia mostly use summative assessment. As a result, teachers pay little attention to formative assessment and often lack the knowledge of the ways of conducting formative assessment and giving feedback. The main objectives of this mixed methods research are to find out what tools of formative assessment are used in the class in a given Armenian high school, whether formative assessment has any impact on students’ achievement and what attitude students and the teacher have towards formative assessment. The proposed sample for the study includes 46 high school students of an Armenian public school of two different classes of the eleventh grade and their English language teacher. The data were collected from the students and the teachers using the following tools: tests, observations, and questionnaires.