论小学英语教学评价策略与方法(3)
As teachers, they may be very familiar with summative assessment or testing, but quite unfamiliar with formative assessment or classroom assessment. They usually use tests to test students’ knowledge and skills that they learned from the textbooks, which focus very much on memory work and they are often done at the end of the term and in the form of a pencil-and-paper test. The results of such tests, which are often presented in grades or marks, are often reported to the students, to the parents and to the school authorities. There remains a question: can test scores be used to inform us about our learning and teaching? The answer is obvious: usually not very much. Why? It is simply because students’ ability and achievement in learning are not measurable in terms of one single test. Even if they can reveal some problems about students’ learning or teachers’ teaching, it is often too late for us to do anything about them as it is already the end of a learning period.