The Formative Assessment of College English Learning Aided by Visual Analytics

Abstract

The concept and practice of formative assessment have been well-recognized and playing increasingly important roles in the field of College English in recent years. One of the distinctive features of formative assessment is that the primary purpose of it is to promote learning, rather than assess its result. To achieve the goal, we must first of all make full use of the information collected in the assessment process, to provide the learners with meaningful and positive feedback. There are various ways to transform information into data, and data into knowledge that can be well-understood by human beings (the learners). Until now, numbers and tables are the most common way of presenting this knowledge. One of the drawbacks of numbers and tables though, is that they can only convey a very limited amount of “understandable†information. By contrast, examples and experimentation seem to suggest that visual analytics may be a better and noteworthy approach to presenting the knowledge of formative assessment.