Formative Assessment Practices to “Leave No Student Behind”: An Experiment to Enhance Text Comprehension Abilities in the Lower Secondary School

The effects of using formative assessment (FA) in schools to sustain stu-dents’ learning have been widely deepened in international literature. In Italy, recent school regulations encouraged teachers to use FA in class-rooms, but little experimental research has been carried out to investigate the potential of FA for improving students’ achievements. The paper de-scribes an experiment to study the effects of FA practices on students’ text comprehension abilities. The participants were 34 students from first-year classes of a middle school who were randomly assigned to the exper-imental (EG) and control group (CG). In the former, the experimenter de-veloped 15 FA activities related to text comprehension, while in the latter, students joined the same number of teaching activities. The same test was used to measure students’ abilities at the experiment’s beginning and end, and the post-pretest difference between the two groups was calcu-lated. Findings didn’t show significant differences, but students from EG with more difficulties in the comprehension task at the beginning revealed a higher increase than those from the CG. Results of the focus group with students from EG add insights to value this result.