Formative Assessment

The process of understanding students and responding to their needs plays an important role in the success of teaching and learning. In recent years, researchers have stressed the role of assessment in this process. Assessment is really vital to the process of education. In schools, the most visible assessments are summative. However, assessment also serves a formative function. In classroom, formative assessment refers to frequent, interactive assessments of student progress and understanding to identify learning needs and adjust teaching appropriately. Teachers using formative assessment techniques are better prepared to meet diverse students’ needs. Over the past few years, there is a growing emphasis on the use of formative assessment.

According to Pajares (1992), he stated that “teachers’ beliefs have a greater influence than the teachers’ knowledge on the way teachers plan their lessons, on the kinds of decisions they make, and on their general classroom practice (….) teachers can identify the level of students’ capacities… select and adjust their behavior and instructional choice accordingly.” From this perspective, he mentioned four main categories of educational beliefs, namely, “teacher efficacy” (affecting students’ performance); “epistemological beliefs” (regarding knowledge), “teachers’ or students’ performance” (refer to the different motivational spheres), and “self-efficacy” (relate to confidence when performing a task). In the same way, Marion Williams (1997) found that teachers’ beliefs were “far more influential than knowledge in determining how individuals organize and define tasks and problems (…) tend to be culturally bound, to be formed early in life and to be resistant to change” (p.243). Another definition of teachers’ beliefs are presented by Gallo & Renandya (2001), they indicated that “teachers’ beliefs are formed on the basis of teachers own schooling as young students while observing teachers who taught them”. To be more specific, teachers emerge as learners, and the way teachers perceive teaching rises

It can be proved in the literature; knowledge is either taken as different from beliefs by nature, or used as a grouping term without distinguishing between what we know and what we believe. According to Verloop (2001), the differences between knowledge and beliefs proves to be “blurry” and “inextricably intertwined”, which makes it impossible to differentiate whether teachers refer to their knowledge or beliefs when they plan and make decisions or perform in the classroom. In addition, Woods (1996) also proposed a network of foreign language teachers’ beliefs, assumptions and knowledge, which can be beneficial to give definitions for the key construct under investigation. Therefore, it is recommended that knowledge and beliefs should not be treated separately. Therefore, in this study, the researcher takes the term teachers’ belief inclusively to embrace the complexity of teachers’ mental lives underlying their