Implementation Pathways and Effectiveness Verification of Formative Assessment in College English Teaching

Abstract

In the context of high-quality development in higher education and the continuous reform of college English teaching, traditional summative assessment is no longer sufficient to evaluate language application, autonomous learning, and technical communication competencies required in engineering fields such as electromagnetic waves, antennas, and propagation. Formative assessment, with its process-oriented, developmental, and interactive characteristics, emphasizes continuous tracking, feedback, and improvement throughout learning, and can support the transition from knowledge transmission to ability cultivation. This study constructs an implementation pathway for formative assessment in college English teaching and verifies its effectiveness through a one-academic-year quasi-experiment. Two comparable undergraduate classes were selected as experimental and control groups, with the experimental group adopting a formative assessment system integrating goal clarification, learning evidence collection, multi-source feedback, self- and peer-assessment, and improvement-oriented re-evaluation. Academic performance, learning motivation, autonomous learning ability, classroom participation, and language application ability were analyzed using quantitative tests and interviews. The results indicate that formative assessment significantly improves students’ oral expression, writing logic, cooperative communication, and learning initiative compared with traditional assessment. The study provides an operational model for engineering-oriented English teaching and offers support for cultivating technical communication abilities in advanced electromagnetic and related disciplines.