Compossed by:
WAHYU WARDANI
NIM. 157835444
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The Significance of Authentic Assessment and Its Relevancies with the Standard
Competencies in the 2013 Curricullum and the Teachers’ Challenges
O’Malley and Pierce (1996: 4) also define authentic assessment as the multiple forms
of assessment reflect ing students’ learning, achievement, motivation, and attitudes toward
classroom instructional activities. Another definition is from Prendeville and Wellman (2011)
in Hijriati (2014: 1155) that authentic assessment is a process of gathering information in
which the skills and needs of a student are identified respectfully to the language and
curricular demands they will encounter. From those above definitions, it can be concluded
that authentic assessment is a kind of recent assessment method done by the teachers which
aims to describe students’ achievement and needs in the teaching learning process through
reflection and monitoring.
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approaches applied. It does not only portray students’ learning progress and motivation but
also give teachers chance to provide feedback and follow-up activities from the result of the
assessment. In addition, four major skills of English such as speaking, listening, reading and
writing can be covered by using authentic assessment. Besides, if authentic assessment is
implemented to measure students’ competence, teachers can decide to select some possible
specific purposes in designing instructional activities both inside and outside classroom based
on students’ achievement and needs so that the assessment can assess all instructional
ativities conducted by the teachers. Therefore, authentic assessment offers a lot of benefits
which are suitable to be implemented as one of assessment methods in the 2013 curriculum.
In line with its goal, the 2013 curricullum provides the terms Core competence and
basic competence. Core competence is the realization of the standard of competence that
must be achieved by the students by completing certain education levels. It contains the
description of qualities that must be achieved, in the forms of moral/religious values (core
competence 1), social attitudes (core competence 2), knowledge (core competence 3), and
skills or the application of knowledge they have learned (core competence 4). Basic
competence, on the other hand, is the competences broke down from the core competence
and provides the competencies of subject matter for each level or grade that to be attained.
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social attitude or moral values, alternative assessment is needed. Brown (2004: 251) then
proposes alternative in assessment such as portfolios, journals, observations, self
assessments, peer assessments, and the like, in an effort to triangulate data about students.
Due to its complexity, many teachers from almost all regions were voicing their
objections towards the new curicullum. They were not ready with the teachers’ competencies
to do all the requirements. As a consequence, the new curriculum had not been implemented
well. From the syllabus, it is the 2013 curriculum, but the implementations are basically are
the conventional curriculum. Whereas, this new curriculum is very promising to get new
paradigm to change the education perspective in Indoneisa, but despite the schools’ readiness
this curriculum creates new problems instead. That can be a challenge for the professional
teacher to break down the constraints in applying the curriculum. The challenges that arise
are as follows.
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The first is that time allotment. Time allotment becomes another challenge in
conducting authentic assessment. As known that authentic assessment takes much time to do.
Most of teachers in Indonesia teach 6-12 classes in a week, each class is about 30 students.
While there are many aspects to be observed, and then analized to get the final scored, then it
can be imagine how stressful they are to analyze hundreds documents. That is why teachers
have to manage time-allotment well if they want to implement this assessment. They should
be able to prepare long schedule from planning to scoring before starting the instruction.
Also, they should give students understanding and guiding about what they will do in the
assessment.
The third is that the objectivity and reliability of scoring. Authentic assessments
require teacher judgment to produce a score. This introduces the possibility of subjectivity
and lack of consensus with other teachers so that teachers have to use inter-rater reliability to
ensure consistency and fairness. Moreover, according to O’Malley and Pierce (1996: 21) the
quality of the scoring needs staff developments activities that can help teachers reach
agreement in scoring any authentic assessment. However, in its realization, because of the
goverment policy in each region, teachers are demanded to give the high score to the
students, in spite of their competencies. It is because that there is an obligation for all schools
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to make their students pass the minimum score or KKM (Kriteria Ketuntasan Minimal).
Whereas, many students, especially in the rural area, who are low level of English
performace get less score than the KKM. As a result, score manipulation is happened and this
opposes the fundamental priciples that in this curriculum the assessment should be the
authentic ones. Therefore, the score itself does not represent the students’ competencies.
These problems drives on challenges for every parties to change their perspective
about the teaching and learning process in Indonesia. They should be more creative,
professional, competitive, and skillful to design and use the assessment so that the goal that
we reach highly represent the fundamental principles in the 2013 curriculum in term of its
authenticity, both in the assessments and the scoring system. Beside, a professional
development or training for teachers on the use of authentic assessment is mostly needed.
The last but not the least is that the supports and movement by every parties, such as, the
teachers, the goverments, and the parents, whether they will changes their views about the
education perspectives.
4. Conclusion
References
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Brown, James Dean & Hudson, Thom. 1998. The Alternative in Language Assessment.
TESOL Quarterly, 32, 653-675
Hijriati, Hanifatul. (2014). Authentic Assessment and the Implications to Students’ Self
Esteem in Teaching English at Senior High School. In Proceedings of the 61st TEFLIN
International Conference, 7-9 October 2014 (pp. 1155-1158). Solo: Sebelas Maret
University
O’Malley, J. Michael and Pierce, Lorraine Valdez. 1996. Authentic Assessment for English
Language Learners. Longman.