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Since the concept of“educational assessment”was first put forward in the 1930s, the study on educational assessment has become one of the important domains in education. Educational assessment is mainly divided into three categories, diagnostic assessment, summative assessment and formative assessment, according to its purposes and functions in the process of instruction. At present, summative assessment is still the primary way of evaluation in our country. In summative assessment, the quality of teaching is mainly decided by examinations, which undoubtedly strengthens the role of scores to some extent and is not helpful to arouse and keep students’enthusiasm and persistence in learning. In order to promote the reform of college English teaching, Requirement on College English Curriculum (2004) was released by the Ministry of Education, which advocates evaluating the learning process and outcome in a more scientific and reasonable way by means of formative assessment.In this thesis, the author explored whether the application of formative assessment was more beneficial to enhancing students’motivation, to developing their positive affect and attitude, and to improving the efficacy of English learning. In the beginning, the thesis reviewed the functions, basic principles and the categories of educational assessment. Then, it expounded on the primary differences between summative assessment and formative assessment. Furthermore, the tools of formative assessment are introduced in detail. Subsequently, the author carried out a comparative experiment on the 62 clinical medicine-major subjects from two classes of first-year students in a medical college, and made statistical analysis of the data obtained from the experiment. In the end, the author discussed the limitation of the study and believed these problems could be solved in future research.The whole thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter One is the Introduction of the paper, in this part, the author systematically analyzed the research content and significance. In Chapter Two, a brief introduction to educational assessment was presented. Afterwards, the author detailed the functions, basic principles and categories of educational assessment. In Chapter Three, summative assessment, formative assessment and the main discrepancies between them were discussed respectively. Especially the instruments of formative assessment, which includes classroom observation, conferences, interviews and questionnaires, portfolios, were explained at length. In Chapter Four, a case study was carried out in order to make a contrast between the effects of summative assessment and formative assessment. In Chapter Five, the author made a careful analysis and discussion of the data acquired from the instruments and came to the conclusion that compared with summative assessment, formative assessment is more beneficial to promoting students’motivation, affect and attitude, and to improving the efficacy of English learning. Chapter Six is the Conclusion of the paper, in this part, the author elaborated on the limitations of present study and the implications for future research.
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