This essay examines if formative assessment causes any impact on upper secondary school students results in social science. Other questions asked are which group of students benefits most from formative assessment and if any connections can be found between the students result and their cognitive approach to learning, problem solving capability and attitude to school. Two classes from a school in Stockholm were chosen to participate in the study. The theoretical framework is mostly based on former research performed by Black and William (1998, 2003). Multiple methods were used, including an experiment with a parallel-group design with two groups, a survey and a problem solving test. Statistics is used to describe and analyze collected data. Both groups were taught during five lessons in the same field of knowledge with the same kind of teaching, apart from formative assessment. After treatment the two groups undertook a written test. Results showed a significant difference in performance for the two classes, with the treatment group performing up to fifteen percent better in abstract thinking. Research data shows that formative assessment had the biggest impact on high performing student’s results. A strong correlation was found between student’s cognitive approach and their score on the written test. Another significant correlation was found between student’s problem solving capability and their score on the test, especially students with a low problem solving capability performed poorly on the written test. To conclude, the study did not reveal the directions of these correlations and possible interpretations are discussed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-40241 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Lindqvist, Tomas |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för didaktik och pedagogiskt arbete |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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