Formative Assessment Practices for Improving Students’ Text Comprehension Abilities: An Experiment in a Lower Secondary School in Italy

Formative assessment (FA) is an expression that covers several practices. While this variety has led to the development of different studies in the international context, there is a lack of experimental research in Italy on the topic. Therefore, this experiment explores the effects of implementing FA practices in the classroom, in terms of students’ text comprehension abilities. A two-group experimental design was carried out involving students from two first-year classes of a lower secondary school in Italy, who were randomly assigned to the treatment or control group. After administering a task on text comprehension abilities, the researcher developed 15 FA activities in the treatment group. At the end of the study, the students’ abilities were measured again and the pre- post-test difference between the two groups was verified. Non-parametric tests were run that did not reveal statistically significant differences. Regardless, a trend shows a slightly higher increase in the achievement of the treatment group.