The effects of formative assessment-based teaching and learning strategy on the students' science concept understanding, motivation and metacognitive ability in middle school

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of the formative assessment-based teaching strategy on the students' science concept understanding, learning motivation, and meta-cognitive ability. Students' perceptions towards this teaching strategy were also examined. Four classes were chosen from a middle school in Busan. Formative assessment-based teaching strategy developed for this study was applied to the experimental group of 2 classes and the traditional teaching strategy was applied to the control group of other 2 classes. The tests of students' learning motivation, meta-cognitive ability were administered before and after the instruction period. The science concept understanding test was administered only after the instruction. The results showed that the new teaching strategy was more effective for enhancing students' concept understanding and learning motivation than the traditional teaching strategy. However, there was no significant difference in metacognitive ability between two groups. From the survey of students' perception, it was found that students thought that the new teaching strategy motivated them to learn and was helpful to understand scientific concepts.