2.2 Studies of Formative Assessment at Home and Abroad 

The research of formative assessment originated in the early twentieth century. In 1911, the father of educational evaluation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, first put forward the concept of educational evaluation in his work The Principles of Scientific Management. He emphasizes that the assessment process, in essence, is a process which is to measure the degree of the curriculum and teaching plan that they actually achieve the education aims. （Chen Yukun,1999：15）In the 1960s, the vast majority of educators and curriculum designers began to pay attention to teaching assessment, for example, Bloom put forward the issue of evaluating the education objectives. However, the main attention was paid to summative assessment, and formative assessment was rarely concerned.

The concept of formative assessment and summative assessment was first distinguished by Scriven in 1967. Formative assessment, in his view, is to gather information to assess the effectiveness of curriculum, and to guide schools to adopt what courses and how to improve courses. And then, American educator, Bloom(1985:6) applied formative assessment into practice and made a great achievement. He put forward a teaching evaluation theory, which takes the achieving degree of goal as the center and pay attention to meet and improve the ability of everyone. The theory greatly promotes the development of modern educational assessment. Since 1990s, the influence of formative assessment on teaching gradually got the attention of foreign scholars. Black (1998:36) exploited firm evidences to show that formative assessment is an essential part of classroom work and with its development standards of achievement can be raised, especially for lower achievers. With the improvement of economy and science, the development of formative assessment could also be reflected in two sides, one is that many journals abroad which are active to publicize the latest development of formative assessment. The other is that some academic authorities paid more attention to formative assessment. For example, they have founded The Center for Assessment Studies in University of Bristol and The Center for Formative Assessment in University of Manchester.