Appropriate formative assessment in a collectionist culture

Much work has been done in recent years on formative assessment and the importance of using feedback loops to close the gap between actual and desired student performance. In this paper, I suggest that as the formative assessment movement expands beyond its Western base, the experience of the English language teaching profession has some useful insights to offer. The profession has had long experience of using formative assessment through the process writing approach, but in recent years it has become wary of simply transferring teaching methods from Western countries to other contexts. Using qualitative interviews with six Hong Kong degree level students, this paper investigates one particular case where the instructor thought that a writing course featuring formative assessment had been very successful but the results of a student evaluation survey indicated otherwise. I conclude that, in what has been termed a “collectionist culture”, it is necessary to dilute the collaborative pedagogy of formative assessment with a more didactic approach.