The Effects of Formative Evaluation on Students' Achievement in English for Specific Purposes (A Case Study of the Preparatory Year Students at Umm- Al-Qura University)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research attempts to find out the impact of formative evaluation on Saudi male learners’ achievement in medical English. The study also seeks to find out instructors’ and students' views and attitudes towards formative assessment. The sample of the study involves 98 subjects chosen purposively from among the Preparatory Year students at Umm-Al- Qura University in Saudi Arabia. They were divided into two equal groups; one is intended to act as an experimental and the other is taken as a control group. The experimental group was taught their ESP material following the formative evaluation techniques whereas the control group was taught the same material in accordance with the summative assessment principles. The experimental group instructors were given intensive training courses in Saudi Arabia and abroad on how to use formative evaluation principles in classroom. In the last week of the experimental period which lasted for sixteen weeks, the two groups sat for the final exam which was intended for all pre-medical students in the Preparatory College. The grades of all students in the two groups in the final exam was compared. The experimental group students performance was found to be much higher than that of the control group. Students' and instructors’ attitudes towards formative evaluation were generated through a questionnaire and a series of interviews. Advanced statistical analysis of the responses of the instructors and students has shown their positive attitudes towards this form of evaluation. The study concludes with some recommendations to enhance this type of assessment and to conduct further studies on female students learning different language skills for different purposes. Suggestions to improve formative evaluation practice were also given to make this form of assessment more motivating and more enticing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".