Improving University Students’ Proactive Learning Through Assessment for Learning: A Case of Academic Writing Class

Abstract

　　This paper presents an exploratory practice of conducting assessment for learning to improve students’ proactive learning. This practice targeted 19 low-proficiency and low motivation private university students taking an English academic writing class taught by one of the authors. To seek a better way to conduct the class considering their proficiency level and motivation, we first aimed to gain better understanding of in what ways students manage to improve their learning proactively by using peer feedback. The overall practice lasted for five weeks and consisted of the following three parts: (a) peer feedback activity, (b) writing correction activity, and (c) scoring students’performance. We collected data from (a) and (b) by using worksheets and classified it into five categories for (a) and six categories for (b). We then scored the final products of students’ writing by using the English Composition Profile. We found that students often provided feedback on content and organization but rarely on form, mechanics, and lexis, which resulted in correspondingly scoring less on form, mechanics, and lexis in their final performance. This finding suggests that their low proficiency led to difficulties in providing feedback in terms of form, mechanics, and lexis, and therefore teachers should offer specific help with basic aspects to English writing to revise them proactively.