See the Problem? - My Forum Post 1 for TLT 476

To begin with, after watching videos and related reading materials for this week activity and assignment, I would like to say that assessment is an “easy” and complicated matter at the same time. How so? Based on my own experiences as a teacher, I would say that realized or unrealized, when we teach students with a strong intention to transfer knowledges or skills in order that they can learn something, we technically make many kinds of assessments along the way. I used to say to my students that any kinds of formal examinations such as mid-term exam or final term exam are not the only means I use to assess their learning, rather I see how good they participate during the classes and in school generally, and this includes how they behave. Nevertheless, when it comes to national regulation, this whole assessment matter becomes much more complicated because it turns out to be not only about the relationship between students and teachers in the process of teaching and learning. In fact, all the elements of the nation have sort of their own portion of responsibility to work together to make a more accurate and fair assessment on students’ learning. What elements do I mean? Well, they are policy makers including curriculum developers, teachers, researchers, publishers, parents, and even students.

I especially enjoyed a video about “Parents take stand against standardized tests”.

In the video, teachers talked about how unaware parents are about a change in standardized testing and how stressful they are about curriculum demands in terms of materials to teach while having unfairly extremely limited times to accomplish all the jobs. There is even an assumption that teachers are set up to be fail. It sounds very familiar to me even though the video was specifically talking about the education system in the United States, but as a matter of fact, it happens in Indonesia as well.

I remember there was a kind of meme on Facebook telling about the difference between the relationships among students, teachers and parents in the late 1960s education system and in ours today. The meme illustrated how it looked like in the former time where parents would be very angry and might even give a sort of punishment to their children in front of their teachers when their grades showed a lack of participation or understanding about the lessons, while today, we have been witnessing parents suing teachers and even causing harms to teachers who grade their children low or happen to be a little bit more “reactionary” to their children’s inappropriate behavior (it happened in Indonesia and even in my own home institution, for the record).

As I mentioned previously in the first paragraph above, elements like policy makers including curriculum developers, teachers, researchers, publishers, parents and even students do have their own portion of responsibility to take part for the betterment of our education today specifically in terms of assessment. Having read a little bit about formative and summative assessment, the only one thing that seems to be really matter to me is the question of how consistent we are in the implementation. This consistency is not an individual problem, rather it is a collective problem that needs to be solved through a collective work. As far as I am concerned, education today is becoming more and more commercial, the government as policy makers seem to be lack of knowledge about the real facts happening in our daily educational life. It is all about demanding and creating profitable projects. Curriculum seemed to be developed without considering the availability and the reliability of references or textbooks being distributed commercially. Some people are competing to produce textbooks and have them published for a commercial purpose and the government does not even seem to be aware of that. This makes me think that my old education system especially during my primary and middle stages, which took place around late 1980s to early 1990s, was way much better because during that era, textbooks for school use were still controlled by a department assigned by the government. There was a sort of disclaimer on each textbook we used that it is not for commercial. With this way, there should be no problem about a standardized testing created by policy makers if they referenced all the test items to the materials they had entrusted to teachers for the delivery to students. I also remember that teachers during that day sometimes attended sort of trainings sponsored by the government that were held locally as well as nationally. Educational research foundations are not even a new thing, right? A thoughtful question of mine, how about rethinking of a reformation in our education system instead of a “revolution” that may or may not create a better change?

Reference

Parents take stand against standardized tests, May 21, 2013 retrieved on January 28, 2017 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCfXYwaZBYw

#assessment #StandardizedTest #textbooks

#commercial #education #NationalCurriculum