PLANNING ASSESMENT

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

A.      Description of The Topic

Assessment is important in learning progress. It can monitor the progression of the students whether they get increased after the lesson or not. Assessment also influence to teachers. They can see whether their lesson are successful accepted by their students or not. They can see the result of their effort to teach the students and also they can diagnosed their student’s weaknesses and the strengthness after give the students evaluation.

B.       The Purpose of The Writing Paper

The goal of this paper is  to give some information about planning assessment that really important for the teacher. This paper containt: (1) Authentic Assessment, (2), Alternative Assessment (3) Characteristics of Alternative assessment,  (4) Principles of Authentic Assessment / Procedure of Alternative Assessment, (5) Forms of Alternative Assessment. (6) Validity, Reliability, Objectivity, Practicality

CHAPTER II

PLANNING ASSESSMENT

A.      Authentic Assessment

Authentic Assessment is a form of assessment in which students are asked to perform task that demonstrate that they have an understanding of essential knowledge and are able to apply it in real-world situation.

Authentic Assessment such as research projects, group projects, scientic experiments, oral presentation, exhibits, and portfolios for various subject areas enable teachers to monitor and assess what students know.

B.       Alternative Assessment

Brown (2001:402) says that assessment is an angoing proccess that encompasses a much wider domain. The teacher subconsciously assess the students’ performance when the students respon to question offer comments try a new word or structure.

In another word, an assessment is the process of documenting, commonly in measurable terms, knowledge, skill, attitudes and beliefs. Assessment can focus on the individuaal learner, the learning community (cass, workshop, or other organized group of learner), the institution, or educational system as a whole.

Alternative Assessment, a form of Authentic Assessment, is the utilization of nontraditional approaches in judging students performance. Robert Rothman asserts that these form of assessment cause student to demonstrated complex thinking, not just isolated skill; they challange the view (implicit in multiple-choice tests) that there is only one right answer to every question and that the goal is to find it and to find it quickly.

C.    Characteristics of Alternative Assessment

According to Brown and Hudson (1998), there are some positive characteristic of Alternative Assessment as follows:

·         Require students to perform, create, produce, or do something

·         Use real-world contexts or simulations

·         Are nonintrusive in that they extend the day-to-day classroom activities

·         Allow students to be assessed on what they normally do in class every day

·         Use tasks that represent meaningful instructional activities

·         Focus on processes as well as products

·         Tap into higher level thinking and problem-solving skills

·         Provide information about both the strengths and weaknesses of students

·         Are multiculturally sensitive when properly administered

·         Ensure that people, not machines, do the scoring, using human judgment

·         Encourage open disclosure of standard and rating criteria

·         Call upon teachers to perform new instructional an assessment roles

D.    Principles of Authentic Assessment / Procedure of Alternative Assessment

1.      Principles of Authentic Assessment

a.      Focuses on Meaningful Goals.

Developing goals is at just the right level on continuum requires teaching to think about meaningful, authentic outcomes that observable and useful to those who use the information gained from the assessment.

b.      Enhances Learning rather than simply serving the purpose of accountabilty

One of the most importance lessons to learn about assessment is that it can and should serve different purposes (Winograd, Paris, and Bridge 1991). We find it useful to think about the various purposes of assessment in terms of different audiences.

c.       Empower Teachers by helping them build the expertise necessary to trust their own professional judgment about learners.

Teacher can use their professional judgment to consider what types of evidence can form the basis for assessment.

d.      Provides Teachers with richer opportunities to engage in linguistically and culturally appropriate evaluation and instruction.

2.      Procedure of Alternative Assessment

Aternative assessment procedures are non instrusive to the classroom,because they do not require a separate block of time to implement them,as the traditional test

There are some procedure:

·         Reflects the curriculum

·         Incongruent with classroom police, provide information on the strength as well as the weaknesses of a student

·         Include the use of checklist

E.     Forms of Alternative Assessment

1.    Selected / Alternatives-Response Assessment

a.      Matching

Matching assessments present students with two lists of words or phrases from which they must select the words or phrases in one list that match the ones in the other list.

Advantages

a.        Low guessing factor

b.       Takes up little space

Disadvantage

a.  Restrictive in measuring ability

b.      Multiple Choice

Multiple-choice assessments require students to examine a sample of language material and select the answer that best completes a sentence or best fills in a blank in the sentence from among a set of three, four, or five options.

Advantages

a.        Low guessing factor

b.       Measures wide variety of learning points

c.        Can provide useful information about student’s ability

Disadvantage

a.        Real life language  is not multiple choice

c.       True-False

True-false assessments present a sample of language and require thestudents to respond to that language by selecting one of two choices, true or false. The primary strength of true-false assessments is that they focus on the students’ abilities to select the correct answer from two alternatives.

Advantages

a.        Focus on students’ abilities to select from two alternatives

b.       Simple and direct indication if a particular point is understood

Disadvantages

b.       Writers may write tricky answer choices

c.        High guessing factor

d.       Emphasis on details and unimportant facts

e.        Difficult for listening and reading passages

2.  Constructed-Response Assessment

a.       Fill-in

      Fill-in assessments give a language context with part of the context removed and replaced with a blank. To answer, students are required to fill in the blanks. Fill-in assessment comes in many shapes and forms, from single-word fill-in items in single sentences to cloze passages with many blanks embedded in a longer stretch of text.

      Advantages

a.        Easy to make and administer

b.       Measures ability to produce small amount of language

c.        Possibility of assessing interaction between receptive and productive skills

      Disadvantages

a.        Narrow focus

b.  Blank may have multiple possibilities

b.      Short-Answer

      Short-answer assessments require the students to scrutinize a question or statement and respond with a one or more phrases or sentences.

      Advantage

a.        Easy to make and administer

      Disadvantages

b.       Assesses only a few phrases or sentences

c.        Multiple answers are possible

c.       Performance

      Performance assessments require students to accomplish approximations of real-life, authentic tasks, usually using the productive skills of speaking or writing but also using reading or writing or combining skills. In short, by definition, the performance assessment has three requirements:

(a) Examinees are required to perform some sort of task,

(b) the tasks must be as authentic as possible,

(c) the performances are typically scored by qualified raters.

                        Advantages

a.        Comes close to getting authentic communication

b.       Measures students’ abilities to respond to real-life language tasks

c.        Counteracts negative washback  effects in standardized testing , like bias

Disadvantages

f.        Difficult to make and time-consuming to administer

g.      Various costs are involved

c.  Reliability, validity, and test security may be problematic

3.      Personal Response Assessment

a.       Conference

     Conference assessments typically involve the student visiting the teacher’s office, usually by appointment, to discuss a particular piece of work or learning process, or both. More importantly, conferences are different from other forms of assessment in that they focus directly on learning processes and strategies.

      Advantages

a.        Foster students reflection of  their own learning process

b.       Develop better self-image

c.        Elicit answers

d.       Gather information

      Disadvantages

h.       Time consuming

i.         Subjective to grade

j.         Typically not scored

b.      Portfolios

Portfolio assessments define as purposeful collections of any aspects of students’ work that tell the story of their achievements, skills, efforts, abilities, and contributions to a particular class.

Advantages

a.        Strengthen students’ learning

b.       Enhance teacher role

c.        Improve testing processes

Disadvantages

k.      Variety in design can be difficult to assess

l.        Issues with logistics

c. Subject to interpretation

d. Limited reliability

e.  Questionable validity

4.      Observations

Observation is one of the way to observe the students’ ability and students’ performance to be the good student. Its cause by one of the characteristics of an effective teacher isthe ability to observe the students as they perform. Teachers are constantly engaged in a process of taking students’ performance and intuitively assessing it and using those evaluations to offer feedback.

5.      Self and peer assessment

Self-assessments require students to rate their own language, whether through performance self-assessments, comprehension self-assessments, or observation self-assessments. Performance self-assessments require students to read a situation and decide how well they would respond in it.

Advantages

a.        Quickly administered

b.       Students are directly involved in  assessment

c.        Help students understanding of  the language process

d.       Increase motivation to learn

Disadvantages

a.        Students’ self-estimates are not always accurate

b.       May be affected by subjective errors

6.      Journals

The assessment qualities of journal writing had have an important role in teaching learning process, because journal writing is dialogue between student and teacher, journals afford a unique opportunity for teacher to offer various kinds of feedback to learners.

F.     Practicality, Objectivity, Reliability, Validity

Practicality, objectivity, reliability, and Validity are the criteria that used to know whether a test is good or not before the teacher give it to the student.

1.    Practicality

Practicality refers to the economy of time, effort and money in testing. In other words, a test should be easy to design, easy to administer, easy to mark, and easy to interpret (the results).

2.    Objectivity

As human, we all have biases, whether we are aware of them or not. A standardized test merely represents agreement among a number of people on scoring procedures, format, and/or content for that specific test. In other words, these individuals are not really objective; they just collectively share the same biases. Therefore, in this sense, a standardized test is no more objective than an alternative assessment instrument. One might argue, moreover, that qualitative data-as from standardized tests-can be more subjective because the numbers or statistics can be manipulated to reflect certain biases on the part of the researcher. There is no reason, then, to consider alternative assessment as being any less objective than traditional testing.

3.    Reliability

According to Brown (2001:386) Reliability test is consistent and dependable.  Sources of unreliability may lie in the test itself or in the scoring of the test, known respectively as test reliability and rater (or scorer) reliability.  If you give the same test to the same subject or matched subjects on two different occasions, the test itself should yield similar result; it should have test reliability.

According to Brown (2001:387) Scorer Reliability is the consistency of scoring by two or more scorer. If very subjective techniques are employed in the scoring of a test, one would not expect to find high scorer reliability. A test of authenticity of pronunciation in which the scorer is to assign a number between one and five might be unreliable if the scoring directions are not clear. If scoring directions are clear and specific as to the exact details the judge shoulependd attend to, then such scoring can become reasonably consistent and dable.

4.    Validity

The most complex criterion of a good test is validity, the degree to which the test actually measures what it is intended to measure.How does one establish the validity of a test? Statistical correlation with other related measures is a standard method. But ultimately, validity can be established only by observation and theoretical justification. There is no final, absolute, and objective measure of validity. We have to ask question that give us convincing evidence that a test accurately and sufficiently measures the test-taker for the particular objective, or criterion, of the test. If that evidence is there, then the test maybe said to have criterion validity. 

REFERENCES

Brown, H. Douglas. 2001. Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Regents, page 384-415

Brown, James D. and Hudson, Thom. 1998. The Alternatives in Language Assessment.TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 32 No. 4.

Winograd, P.S. Paris, and C. Bridge. 1991. Improving the assessment of Literacy. “the Reading Teacher 45, 2: 108-116

http://www.stcoll.edu.jm/Education/PDF/Classroom%20Assessment/Articles/authentic_assessment_in_the_classroom.pdf