The effect of formative assessment technique on 7th grade students' academic success and their attitudes in the unit of "Solar System and Beyond: Space Puzzle"

This study has been carried out to fulfill the effect on 7th grade students' academic success and their attitudes towards the Science and Technology course in the unit of "solar system and beyond: space puzzle". The semi–experimental methods with pre-test post-test, experiment and control groups were used in the study. 60 (sixty) 7th grade students who were studying in a secondary school in the city center of Agri, participated as a sample in this research. The experimental group was composed of 30 students of 7-A class and the control group included 30 students of 7-C class. The practice of this research was performed in the spring season of the 2014-2015 academic years in three weeks. During the practice the formative assessment method was used in the experimental group and traditional method in control group. The data of this research were collected by using an academic achievement test and a science attitude test both as pre-test, post-test. The independent sample t-test was used to analyze the data between the groups and paired t-test was used to analyze the data in the groups. According to the results, at the end of the formative assessment activities applied to the experimental group, obtained from the analyses it was concluded that the average success of the students participated in the experimental group is very high compared to the average success of control group. It was seen that the students' academic success in the experimental group was higher than the students' academic success in the control group and the significant difference between them was very high. As another result a very small difference was identified between experiment and control groups in terms of students' attitudes towards science.