Enhancing Reading Comprehension through Formative Assessment Practices: Evidence from an Experimental Study at Elementary School Level

Abstract

Present study aimed to enhance students’ reading comprehension through formative assessment practices at elementary level. The study was experimental in nature. A Quasi experiment pretest-posttest non- equivalent control group research design was used to conduct the experiment. Participants of the study were the students of grade 6 from elementary school of Lahore. Two intact groups were formed as control and experimental group. Each group has 30 participants. A pretest and posttest was developed to measure students’ reading comprehension through formative assessment technique. English Reading Comprehension Test was developed by the researcher which included MCQs, short questions and reading comprehension paragraphs. A table of specification was developed for items selection. An item analysis was conducted to check the item difficulty of the test items. Lesson plans were developed by the researcher to conduct the experiment. Formative assessment techniques including analyzing students’ work, strategic questioning and think pair share were applied to develop reading comprehension skill among students of grade 6. Data were analysed using independent samples t-test and paired samples t-test to test the hypotheses of the study. Findings of present study concluded that formative assessment technique has significant effect in enhancing 6th grade students’ English reading comprehension, whereas an insignificant difference was found between pretest scores of 6th grade control group students’ English reading comprehension. Pretest-posttest scores found significantly different between control and experiment groups of 6th grade students’ English reading comprehension before and after intervention. Study recommends to apply formative assessment techniques to enhance 6th grade students’ reading comprehension at elementary level.