چكيده
The aim of this study is to see the effect of formative assessment on Iranian university students' writing performance. To fulfill the purpose of this study, learners from two classes in Islamic Azad University (South Tehran Branch) were selected. They were in their sixth semester in English Language Teaching. The learners were taking the essay writing course which lasted 16 sessions. At the beginning, a homogeneity test--Nelson English Language Tests for Intermediate students--was administered to the two groups under study. In the first group, 36 learners and in the second group 34 learners took the test. After the homogeneity test, those whose scores were above the mean were selected for the study. Each group consisted of 30 subjects. These learners were pretested through five-paragraph essay writing to prove that there was no significant difference between the performances of two groups in the beginning of the study. During the course of study, the students in the experimental group received the treatment which was formative assessment; however, the control group only received the conventional instruction for their essay writing. The same pretest was administered again as posttest, along with the final exam, in order to see the effect of formative assessment on their writing performance. Given the non-normal distribution of
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scores, again non-parametric test of Mann-Whitney was run. Post-test data analysis showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group as the result of formative assessment.
