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Abstract
Authentic assessment refers to the multiple forms of assessment that reflect student learning, achievement, motivation, attitudes on instructionally-relevant activities (O’Malley and Pierce, 1996). This qualitative research investigated the implementation of authentic assessment of curriculum 2013 in the classroom, and the obstacles that the teacher might encounter during its’ implementation. The instruments used in this research are classroom observations, and interviews. The classroom observation was applied to see the most frequently used authentic assessment techniques by the teachers in assessing attitude in the classroom. While the interview was conducted to find out the teacher’ challenges in implementing it. This research involved an elementary school English teacher in a private elementary school who has implemented Curriculum 2013 and a class of six grader. The result showed that there are some specific pattern employed by the teacher in assessing each coverage (attitude, knowledge, and skills) required by curriculum 2013. The teacher mostly used observation to assess the attitude. While for the challenges faced by the English teacher, it was revealed that, there are some challenges identified in implementing authentic assessment. The first challenge of authentic assessment is a large number of students. The second challenge stemmed from student’s internal constraint. As the third challenge relates to time constraint. This research still needs to be improves in term of time allocation and number of respondent to get a more detail and accurate result.
Keywords: implementation, curriculum 2013, authentic assessment, attitude, challenge
1. INTRODUCTION
The emergence of Curriculum 2013 is quite shocking for some people since they consider it so different from the previous one.
In order to understand the new curriculum, it is necessary for us to read and examine the whole document, see the structure, understand the content, and figure out how to apply it in teaching and learning process. Many components need to be considered to understand the whole things of the curriculum- the goals, objectives, the course content, the sequence, etc. - but in this research the focus of the discussion is on the assessment part.
Based on the Implementation Guidelines of the Curriculum 2013, it is stated that: 1) assessment is directed to measure students’
competence stated in the curriculum, 2) it is basically criterion-referenced assessment, 3) It is an ongoing process, that all indicators are assessed, and then analyzed to see what have been or have not been achieved by students, and then to locate students’ difficulties in achieving the competence, 4) The result of the assessment is used to give feed backs and follow-up activities for students to reach the competence.
2. THEORETICAL FOUNDATION
Authentic assessment is a process of gathering information through which the skills and needs of a student are identified with
respect to the language and curricular demands they will encounter. O’Malley and Pierce (1996: 11-14) further explain that authentic assessment is the multiple forms of assessment that reflects student learning, achievement, motivation, and attitudes on instructionally-relevant classroom activities.Authentic assessment is designed to deal with the implementation of 2013 curriculum which forces teachers to develop better instructional activities and improve students’ learning outcome through the newest approaches applied.
Related to the competence that must be learned by students, Curriculum 2013 mentions the terms Core competence and basic competence. Core competence is the realization of the standard of competence that must be achieved by the graduates upon completion of 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). The quality of the core competence must be balanced between the hard skills and soft skills.
The coverage of the learning outcome includes attitude (spiritual and social), knowledge, and skill. Technique and assessment instrument in curriculum 2013 applied authentic spiritual in assessing learning progress of the students that covers attitude, skills, and knowledge.
Assessing attitude competence started from the feeling (like and dislike) that connected to someone’s tendency in responding object. Attitude is also expression from values and beliefs of someone. Attitude can be formed, so that there is an expectable behavior changing. There are some ways in assessing students’ attitude. Those include observation, self-assessment, peer- assessment, and journal assessment.
Instruments that can be used in assessing are checklist, rating scale with rubrics to count based on the modes.
3. METHODOLGY
The case study design employed for this research. A case study is an in-depth exploration of a bounded system (e.g., an activity, an event, a process, or an individual) based on extensive data collection (Cresswell, 2007). To ensure the internal validity in the research design, several methods of data collection should be used for triangulation purposes (Yin, 2003). In this research there are three data instruments that will be conducted by
the researcher. Those are classroom observation and interview.
In a qualitative inquiry, the intent is not to generalize the findings, but to develop an in- depth exploration of a central phenomenon.
Thus, to best understand the phenomenon, the researchers purposefully or intentionally selects individuals and site. Cresswell (2008) states that the research term used for qualitative sampling is purposeful sampling. The participants of this research was an English teacher coming from a private elementary school and her sixth grader students. And this research was conducted in a private elementary school which has been applying curriculum 2013.
Data analysis consists of examining, categorizing, testing, or otherwise recombining qualitative evidence to address the initial propositions of a study. In a qualitative study a researcher needs to analyze the data to form answers to the research questions. This process involves examining the data in detail to describe what the researcher learned, and developing themes or broad categories of ideas from the data (Cresswell, 2008).In the present study, the data analyses was conducted to answer two research questions.
4. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
The implementation of 2013 curriculum resulted many changes in teaching and learning process, particularly in English language
subject. In Permendikbud No. 81a 2013, the authentic assessment is regarded to be implemented as the suitable method of assessing not only students’ competence but also the students’ attitude. The authentic assessment is implemented in order to improve the quality of assessment conducted by the teachers.
From the four instruments suggested in Permendikbud No. 81a 2013 in assessing the students’ attitude, i.e. observation, self- assessment, peer-assessment and journal assessment, in the current research, only two instruments were more frequently appeared.
Those were observation and journal assessment.
As it is summarized in the chart, the teacher gave more attention on the students’
confidence (34%), then responsibility (31%), honesty (14%), responsibility (11%), discipline (7%), and spiritual (3%). Those percentage was gained from the activities that the teacher conducted in the classroom in assessing her students.
Clearly stated in PermenNo. 81a 2013, the attitude assessment covers spiritual dan social aspects. Therefore, the class should always be began by activity that might enhance the students’ spiritual belief. In this study, the teacher started and ended the class with activities that relate to spiritual aspect, i.e., praying, as it can be seen in the activity #1.
Even if the spiritual activities are only 3% out of all activities conducted by the teacher,
Above all, however, the teacher mostly concerned with the students’ confidence compare to the other aspects of attitude. It is because the teacher want to improve the students’ confidence. After confidence, the teacher emphasized on honesty as the aspect needed to be assessed from the students.
In activity#18 the teacher was clearly assessing the students’ honesty and responsibility through observation. By asking the students to check their own answer and to count and to write down their own score, the teacher tried to foster the students’ honesty and also responsibility.
The teacher believed that honesty is one of the most important attitude aspects that her students should have. Therefore, as it is stated by Krathwohl.et.al (1964) at the end the students could adopt the value and consider it as their features in thinking, saying, communicating and doing (characters).
The result of observation reveals that there are at least four challenges encountered in implementing authentic assessment in learning process. The challenges will be described and elaborated in the following discussion, completed by the excerpts which show specific interaction in the classroom to support the analysis.
The first challenge of authentic assessment is a large number of students. In this case, forty students participated in the learning teaching process. In the explanation session, there seemed no problem at all since it could be well handled by the teacher. However, the problem emerged in several assessing sessions, especially when the teacher employed observation technique to assess students’
knowledge and attitude.
The second challenge encountered by the teacher in implementing authentic assessment stemmed from student’s internal constraint. In this case, only several students participated in classroom interaction, while the rest remained silent or stated unrelated comments.
The third challenge faced by the teacher in implementing authentic assessment relates to time constraint. In this case, limited time allotment created some obstacles in authentic assessment. It has been acknowledged that authentic assessment, in some ways, needs sufficient time to be well applied. This problem has also mentioned in a previous study (Suprananto, 2013) that one of the main problems in the implementation of Kurtilas is time limitation in assessing with various assessing techniques for all K-I (Kompetensi inti).
5. CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
After discussing the findings from the data gained from the observation, the interviews, and documents analysis, the researcher draws the following conclusion.
In assessing the attitude, the teacher mostly used observation and journal as the instruments. Further, there were six aspects the teacher assessed from her students. Those aspects include spiritual attitude, discipline, confidence, honesty, responsibility, and team work. From the sixth aspects, some got more attention compared to the others. Therefore, as it is stated by Krathwohl.et.al (1964) at the end the students could adopt the value and consider it as their features in thinking, saying, communicating and doing (characters).
As the second issue in this study, there are some challenges identified in implementing authentic assessment. The first challenge of authentic assessment is a large number of students. The second challenge encountered by the teacher in implementing authentic assessment stemmed from student’s internal constraint. The third challenge faced by the teacher in implementing authentic assessment relates to time constraint. In this case, limited time allotment created some obstacles in authentic assessment. The researchers suggest a further study related to the implementation of authentic assessment in a longer time and more participants to present more significant findings on the primary issue.
References
[1] Creswell, J. W., and Clark, V. L. P. (2007).
Designing and Conducting Mixed Methods Research. London: Sage Publications, Inc.
[2] Creswell, J. W. (2008). Educational Research: planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research. New Jersey: Pearson Education Inc.
[3] Departemen Pendidikan Nasional Republik Indonesia.
(2013).ImplementasiKurikulumnomor 81 A tahun 2013.Jakarta: Kemdikbud.
[4] O’Malley, J. Michael and Pierce, Lorraine Valdez. 1996. Authentic Assessment for English Language Learners. Longman.