At the meeting on last Friday on 03th of Desember 2010, I studied the materials on the assessment in PETA class. Before starting the lesson, our lecture gave us two examples of cases that provoke our thinking. The first is regarding the case of a teacher named Nancy who evaluated students with a variety of ways. She understood that it turns out that assessment can not be viewed from one side. It originated from the changing way of assessing pupils until eventually she knew that her students have different abilities. The second part is about “the purpose of the assessment itself.” In this case, a math teacher did various ways for assessing her students’ ability. It’s purposed in order to make the students really understand about the material of fraction that she have been given. So what is the mean of assessment itself?
Based on my understanding about my lecture explanation, assessment is the way to gain some information about our students’ ability or capability on materials that we have delivered to them. It is easy to understand about it, because I have learned this material before in my LTM class. There are kinds of assessment, formative assessment, summative assessment and diagnostic assessment. Here the brief explanation of it:
- Formative assessment is the type of assessment that is done during teaching and learning process.
- Summative assessment is the type of assessment that is done in the end of teaching and learning process.
- Diagnostic assessment is the type of assessment that is done before teaching and learning process begins.
Which one is important for assess our students? Of course all is important. As the teacher we should combine all the types in the order to make it perfect. But I though we also have to apply it based on context, because we will meet our students with their each different ability, wont it? For example, our government set UAN as the main assessment to decide whether the students able to continue their education or not, whereas not every students are able in paper pencil test. So, when some of them failure to pass the test, can we blame the students? Of course not! It is not fair for them. UAN is a kind of summative assessment which is done in the end teaching-learning process. We can’t set it as the main assessment because it can not describe the overall students’ ability. I supposed formative learning is more appropriate and decisive to assess our students, because we do it during teaching-learning process.
So, I agreed with what my lecture have said about types of assessment. She illustrated the iceberg as it. The bottom part which the big one as formative learning and summative as the top one. Why the formative as the big one. As I have said before because it is more decisive to assess our student.Ok, I think everything almost effective in this meeting. Maybe the numbers of student that came late including me is the only one problem. I hope I can apply what I have learned in this meeting to my students well.
hehehe Amiin
