Investigating science teacher assessment literacy - understanding, classroom assessment practices, challenges and opportunities : a case study in a madrasah school in Lombok

Abstract

Over the past two decades, there has been a mounting concern about the comparison of scholastic achievement of students worldwide, including Indonesia. OECD has disclosed PISA assessment results showing a global decline in student performance in the domains of reading, mathematics, and science. In an educational index, 21 provinces in Indonesia, including NTB is the position of under 50% of educational attainment index, even worse in some districts if looking at the results of ANBK and UTBK, a kind of national public examination, for some latest years. These low levels of performance have been attributed to various factors: teacher-student relationships, quality teachers, the socioeconomic status of students, the use of information and communication technology, and the implementation of metacognitive methods. Quality teachers are really matters. This is in line with syntheses of 500,000 research articles asserting that one of many factors contributing to the success of students’ performance is teachers’ quality in elements of teaching and assessment competency. Regarding the teacher’s assessment competency, there are limited numbers of study dealing with this concern in Indonesia, particularly in science teachers. Thus, this study wantsto investigate Madrasah Schoolscience teachers’ assessment literacy. Thisresearch employed a qualitative approach using descriptive case study design in one of private madrasah schools in West Lombok, NTB. It involves three teacher participants from three different subjects to get their conception, assessment practice, factor of the designing and implementing assessment, along with their constraints and opportunity. Observation along with documentaries and interviews were used to collect the data, and the analysis of the data using inductive and deductive thematic analyses. Findings depict that the teachers have (1) sufficient conception regarding the assessment literacy – level two and have potential to develop further; (2) some considerations in designing and implementing the formative assessments; (3) two to three types of assessment used in their classroom teaching based on the assessment principles and approaches; and (4) challenges on students’ readiness and learning sources. Moreover, the finding revealed that the school has provided a regular, annual training to improve teacher assessment literacy, followed by the government training in the form on an online platform.