UNIVERSITY TUN ABDUL RAZAK 1 TESTING AND EVALUATION IN EDUCATION

Raising the standards of learning is what the government strive every moment and every day in order to be able to mould the youngsters of this generation into being able to compete in the international standards and become the next reliable and better leaders of the country in the near future. The governments all over the world have been more and more enthusiastic in making changes to achieve this aim. Programs have been enhanced to test the students externally; conducting surveys; making the initiatives in order to improve school planning and management; and repeated and detailed inspections are done to pursue this particular aim. However, do all of these modifications sum up to become an effective policy? In my opinion, there are still some elements missing in raising the standards, particularly in the perspective of the teaching and learning activities. Some might say that the teachers in school are doing a great job in teaching and some would say that the students are learning well. However, from my point of view, not all of the teachers can really teach and not all of the students can really learn. We need to somehow find a way to incorporate the teaching and learning activities with effectiveness. From my understanding, assessment is the process of gathering data about the students learning, performance and their attitude which includes the construction and the administration of various types of measures. According to Popham (2000, p. 5), assessment domain is defined as a particular body of educationally relevant knowledge, skill or affect [i.e., attitude]. Assessment domains are defined by the governments policies, manuals or textbooks, content or performance standards, and teacher or trainer preferences. According to Paul Black and Dylan William (1998), Learning is driven by what teachers and pupils do in classrooms. Teachers have to manage complicated and demanding situations, channelling the personal, emotional, and social pressures of a group of 30 or more youngsters in order to help them learn immediately and become better learners in the future. Standards can be raised only if teachers can tackle this task more effectively. This means that learning is only achieved

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when a teacher is able to handle situations that are very demanding and difficult by focusing on the personal, emotional and social pressures of around 30 or more students in order to help them learn instantly and become even better learners in the future. According to a website, classroom assessment is both a teaching approach and a set of techniques. The approach is that if the teacher is very knowledgeable on the subject that he or she is teaching and he or she knows how the students are learning the subject, then, the teacher will be able to plan his or her learning activities in order to make the teaching more structured. The techniques are mostly simple, in which the teacher will be organising activities done in the class where it is non-graded and anonymous which can give both the teacher and the students useful feedback on the teaching-learning process. Classroom assessment is different from tests and other forms of student assessment. Classroom assessment is aimed more towards improving the course rather than assigning grades. The primary goal is for the teacher to better understand how his or her students' learn and to improve the teachers teaching. Schools nowadays are more towards using formative assessment. Formative assessment is usually made during the development of a program in order to help the teacher gain more information about improving the teaching. Besides that, it is also done so that the teacher will be able to modify the test according to the topics that have been covered in class. Formative assessment is also used to improve the program before it is completed. Formative assessment helps teachers to see whether their teaching has helped the students learn about the topics and how far do their students understand what is being taught in class. By using formative assessment, there are a lot of rooms for improvement especially on how the students are learning and the problems that the students are facing in receiving the knowledge.

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The real question here is, can formative assessment really measure the knowledge of the topics that the students learn throughout the whole year of learning? In my opinion, yes it can. Formative assessment can do this. However, it must be done continuously. We should not do it only once in a while. It must be done periodically. By this way, the teachers can see how far their students understand the topics they are covering and how well their teaching methods are on covering the topics that they are teaching. By using formative assessment continuously, teachers will be able to assess their students knowledge and see if there are still rooms for improvement. In other words, we need to integrate formative assessment and continuous assessment together. Continuous assessment is defined as a mechanism whereby the final grading of learners in the cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains of learning systematically takes account of all their performances during a given period of schooling (Falayalo, 1986). The assessment in the cognitive domain is linked with the course of knowledge and understanding. The affective domain refers to the characteristics such as manners, motivation, interests, and other personality behaviours. The psychomotor domain involves the learners ability to use his or her hands. From this definition, we can conclude that continuous assessment is an assessment approach which involves using various instruments of assessing, and assessing the various domain of learning such as, cognitive, affective and psychomotor and that it will also take place over a period of time. Now comes the point where we ask, Why is the government still trying to raise the standard of learning? From my point of view, the government is still doing this because there are some problems in the current assessment. Mainly, the teachers are not really teaching. In other words, the newly recruited teachers have not much knowledge in teaching and so they fail on trying to pass on the knowledge of the topics that they are teaching to the student smoothly. This is mostly because they did not try to change their teaching method according to the students abilities. Instead, they choose to change their teaching method

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according to their own comfort. They usually use teacher-centred curriculum where they teach the students and pass on their knowledge on the subjects that they are teaching. There are little or no interaction between the teacher and students during the learning process. Doing this makes it very hard for the students to voice out their opinion and to let their creativity flow because they are restrained by the teacher and can only provide the answers that are taken from the textbooks. This type of teachers smothers the students into submission and stops their creativity from flowing out. They bring out rote learning to life one more and as I have learnt, rote learning is to learn by memorising and not by understanding. This is wrong because students need to understand what is being taught in order for them to learn and absorb the knowledge that the teacher is trying to pass on to them. Besides that, this method of teaching is quite old and they need to teach according to the passing of time. The teachers have to learn to choose a teaching method that is suitable not only for them but also for the students. Another problem in the current assessment is that the students are not learning properly. Each of the students in a class all differ in their personality and behaviour. If there are 30 students in a class, then there are 30 different personalities in the class itself. There comes a problem for teachers, especially freshly graduated teachers, in managing a classroom full of students with different levels of abilities, attitudes and personality. Its hard for the low achievers to keep up with what the teacher is teaching if the teacher only concentrates on the middle and high achievers. This will give a huge blow in the low achievers self-esteem because they feel that the teacher is biased and only has time for the middle and high achievers. This huge blow develops into problematic attitude where the low achievers just lost their interest in learning and decide to become troublemakers in the class. Now, this will make the teachers job even harder because they not only have problems in trying to teach the

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students, but they also have to find a way to stop the problematic students from disrupting the teaching-learning activities. When there are problems, there are solutions to the problems. For the first problem, my suggestion is for the teachers to change their teaching method for the students sake and not for their own sake. If I were to suggest a suitable teaching method, I would suggest cooperative learning. This is because, in cooperative learning, the students will be members of an interdependent, problem solving group. This means that they will have to collaborate, share, and delegate responsibilities; work together with other members of varying abilities and communicate with their members. By using this teaching method, the teacher is not only encouraging the students to communicate with each other and the teacher himself, but the teacher is also encouraging them to be more creative and combining their ideas together to produce even better ideas. The teacher will also have not much worry on the low achieving students because grouping students with different abilities in a group is good way to help them learn not only from the teachers teaching, but also from the help of their group members. For the second problem, I suggest for teachers to be more apt and attentive to their students needs, especially the low achieving students because they really need a most of the teachers attention. Some students behave badly because they are ignored when they really need help. If a teacher just brushes away the students, then of course the students will behave negatively. I suggest that teachers at least try to pay more attention to problematic and low achieving students because they need the teachers help the most. As I have stated earlier, cooperative learning is a good teaching method. So, the teacher should try to incorporate that method of teaching in his or her teaching-learning activities. This will make the gap between the different abilities students smaller because they are all grouped with students with varying

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abilities. What I am trying to say is that by putting students with different abilities in a group, the students with higher achievements can help the students who are middle achievers and low achievers. This also helps the teacher to concentrate on and discover students who need his or her help the most. To conclude this assignment, I would like to say that the governments endless effort in raising the learning standards can and will be achieved in the near future. The governments main concern is the teaching methods that the teachers incorporate in their teaching-learning activities. I would like to suggest that the freshly graduated teachers be given a course on effective teaching methods, especially when they are dealing with problematic students. I could envision the future where our schools standards are as good as or even better than the standards of the schools throughout the world. We will have students who are capable to succeed us in the future and who can compete with the students from other countries all over the world. However, to reach that standard, we must use continuously have formative assessment so that we can identify the problems that both the teachers and the students have. By this way, we will be able to tackle the problem prematurely and find the solutions to the problems.

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Reference: 1. Paul Black, Dylan William, (1998), Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards through Classroom Assessment 2. http://www.nied.edu.na/publications/journals/journal9/Journal%209%20Article%202. pdf 3. Office of Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculties. Classroom assessment techniques (Indiana University). 4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_learning 5. http://edtech.kennesaw.edu/intech/cooperativelearning.htm