Formative assessment practices of secondary school teachers in abakaliki education zone of ebonyi state

The study was designed to examine formative assessment practice of secondaryschool teachers in Abakaliki education zone of Ebonyi State. The studywas a descriptive survey research design guided with four research questions and four hypotheses. Relevant literatures were reviewed under conceptual framework, theoretical framework, review of empirical studies and summary of literature review. The population of the study is made up of 3,220 teachers from the 110 public secondary schools in Abakaliki Education zone of Ebonyi State. The sample size of this study is 358 teachers. This was done using proportionate and simple random sampling techniques. The instruments that were used for data collection is a checklist (observation) and a rating scale. The checklist contains 14 items that the rating scale is titled "Formative Assessment Practice of Teachers Scale" (UF APTS) which has 29 items.. The, instrument was face-validated by threespecialists: two from Educational Foundations, one from Measurement and Evaluation and the last one from Curriculum Studies. The reliability of the instrument was tested using Cronbach alpha and a reliability index of 0.89 was obtained.Descriptive and inferential statistics were used in data analyses. Frequency, proportion, means, mean of means and standard deviation were used to answer research questions. One sample t-test (i.e. t-test of difference between sample and population means) were used to test the hypotheses 1, 2, and 4 while t-test of proportion were used to test hypotheses 3 at 0.05 level of significance.The major findings of the study includes amongst others: that teachers see formative assessment as a tool that provide for a better evaluation of students than the formal assessment and that it also provides valuable learning experience for students. It was also found that teachers have the knowledge/skills to establish learning targets using formative assessment, can monitor students’ progress toward the learning targets and provide feedback and consider observation techniques as the key technique for formative assessment proportion of the teachers using formative assessment. Based on the findings of the study the researcher recommended among others: teachers should endeavor to use the different formative assessment tools/methods to improve learning assessment in schools. Teachers should be adviced on the need to use formative assessment feedback and to let them know its importance on students' performance. School Administrators should emphasize the use of formative assessment by all teachers and they should allow, encourage and provide incentive for them to attend seminars, workshops, conference and in - service training to enhance their performance and to acquire necessary skills to construct formative tests.