My Reflection on Assessments

The assessment is one of my concerns on teaching and learning process. It is not only because of my obligation as a teacher, but also many problems and issues that happened in my country related to the fairness of assessments. My experiences taught me that teaching is not only teaching the material, but also giving the meaningful learning experiences for my students. My mistake was only focused on the students’ achievement, which influenced my students to be “score oriented”. They would do anything to get the best score, such as cheating. These conditions encourage me to think about what do the good assessments.

Under the traditional assessment, my creativity is limited (Bain, Ballantyne, Mills, & Lester, 2002). I just focused to increase my students’ score. I just gave my students the objective tests monthly to assess my students. The outcomes was very disappointed, my students could not answer the questions correctly. If, they could answer the questions correctly, I did not have information that how was their strategies to solve the problems. In addition, my list of questions cannot assess my students’ understanding of the concepts. The types of questions tend to encourage students to remember the material rather than understand the concept. I realized that this type of assessment is really the unfair way to assess my students’ performance. Therefore, I motivate myself to improve my knowledge and skills on the ideal assessments.

My experiences at SMEC, especially on the foundation and issues course about the assessment influence to think about the ideal assessment that I can apply. At the first time, I just think that it will be impossible because most classes in Indonesia are larger classes. However, the lecturer told me about the example of the assessment in Singapore that applied in the larger classroom. Therefore, the willingness of the teachers to give the best skills that they have will be important. In my country, the government encourages the teachers to apply the outcome-based education by giving them the high salary. Therefore, I hope that me and the other teachers in Indonesia applied that approach are not only because of the money, but also because of their awareness of teachers’ role in teaching and learning process.

Recently, I thought about three types of assessment that I learnt on foundation and issues. Each type of assessment has the strength and the limitations. Therefore, I though that the comprehensive assessments through varied types of assessments will help me to assess my students effectively. I am interested to apply the goal-based assessment which involves my students’ participations on their own learning process. It changes my mind that teacher is the only one person who can assess their students in the classroom setting. I never think about students and teacher collaboration to construct the assessments. In addition, my research is related to metacognition which give the meaningful learning experience through students’ awareness of their own learning progress. Therefore, this assessment will be interesting to apply in the classroom. I realized that I could not take away the norm-referenced assessment. However, I will not use the norm-referenced assessment as the only one assessment that I will apply. Furthermore, the criteria-referenced assessment will be relevant to assess my students’ performance in laboratory. I will give the clear criteria which are expected to help the students achieve the learning goals (Baughin, Brod, Page, 2002). Furthermore, the information from the criteria-referenced assessment provides information for students on the skills that they need to improve.

In conclusion, the assessments can help the teachers to create the meaningful learning experiences to their students. The teachers can motivate their students to improve their performances. In addition, the students can participate to assess their own learning progress. Comprehensive assessments can give the complete picture of the students’ skills and performance (Fukuda, 2007). This valuable information can be used to improve teaching and learning process. The important part of the application of the assessment is teacher willingness to work hard to apply the assessment which can appropriate to assess their students’ performance.