The Use Formative Assessment to Assess Students’ Abilities to Face the Challenges of the Professional Life: The Case study of Master II Students in Language and Communication at at the department of English at MMUTO

Abstract

The present study is mainly concerned with the implementation of formative assessment at the level of the Department of English at Mouloud Mammeri of Tizi-Ouzou as well as its implementation to prepare students to face the challenges of the professional life. It is attempted to determine the extent to which teachers rely on formative assessment to assess their students understanding during the instructional process, then to check out whether students are assessed regularly to be able to enter the job market. The experiment was conducted in the MMUTO following the works of Cizek (2008:8) and (CERI) the Center for Educational Research and Innovation (2008:6) and using a mixed method research. Thus, two questionnaires were distributed to forty two students of Master II Language and Communication and eight teachers. SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences Version 21) was used for statistical data analysis while Qualitative Content Analysis helped us to interpret the results of the interview. On the basis of the results of the study, despite the awareness of the importance of formative assessment in both teaching and learning process, teachers and students role do not correspond exactly to what is mentioned in the framework. The results also reveal that there are many inhibiting factors that our participants met when implementing Formative assessment during the instructional process and when assessing students to prepare them for the professional life. Therefore, as far as we are concerned, to improve the implementation of formative assessment at the level of the department of English we have deduced some solutions at the end of this dissertation.