LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE TEACHING ASSESSMENT

The Significance of Authentic Assessment and Its Relevancies with the

Standard Competencies in the 2013 Curricullum
and the Teachers’ Challenges

Compossed by:
WAHYU WARDANI
NIM. 157835444

POST GRADUATE PROGRAM

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE DEPARTMENT
SURABAYA STATE UNIVERSITY
2016

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 The Significance of Authentic Assessment and Its Relevancies with the Standard
Competencies in the 2013 Curricullum and the Teachers’ Challenges

The execution of 2013 curriculum came about numerous adjustments in instructing

and learning process, especially in English subject. The changes happened in all steps in the
English Language Teaching including teaching strategies, teaching material, as well as
assessment. Accordingly, the goverment issues Permendikbud No. 81a 2013, a set of roles
on assessment that suits to the new curriculum. It is written that, authentic assessment are
regarded to be implemented as the suitable method of assessing students’ competence. The
authentic assessment is implemented in order to improve the quality of formative assessment.
However, the skillful English teachers are required in implementing this authentic
assessment. As a result, those become challenges for the teachers. This paper, therefore, is
aimed to discover the significance of authentic assessment in the 2013 curriculum with its
relevancies to the standard competencies and the teachers’ challenge toward it.

1. The Nature of Assessment

Assessment is a component of a curriculum design. It is an integral part of the
teaching and learning process. Teachers assess students’ learning from the beginning until the
end of the teaching process. Assessment is an ongoing process that encompasses a much
wider domain than tests. It can be in the form of feedback, comments, questions,
confirmations, corrections, quizzes, tests, etc. (Brown, 2004: 4).

O’Malley and Pierce (1996: 4) also define authentic assessment as the multiple forms
of assessment reflect ing students’ learning, achievement, motivation, and attitudes toward
classroom instructional activities. Another definition is from Prendeville and Wellman (2011)
in Hijriati (2014: 1155) that authentic assessment is a process of gathering information in
which the skills and needs of a student are identified respectfully to the language and
curricular demands they will encounter. From those above definitions, it can be concluded
that authentic assessment is a kind of recent assessment method done by the teachers which
aims to describe students’ achievement and needs in the teaching learning process through
reflection and monitoring.

Related to the implementation of the 2013 curriculum, authentic assessment is highly

relevant since it can describes the progress of students’ achievement in line with the new

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approaches applied. It does not only portray students’ learning progress and motivation but
also give teachers chance to provide feedback and follow-up activities from the result of the
assessment. In addition, four major skills of English such as speaking, listening, reading and
writing can be covered by using authentic assessment. Besides, if authentic assessment is
implemented to measure students’ competence, teachers can decide to select some possible
specific purposes in designing instructional activities both inside and outside classroom based

on students’ achievement and needs so that the assessment can assess all instructional
ativities conducted by the teachers. Therefore, authentic assessment offers a lot of benefits
which are suitable to be implemented as one of assessment methods in the 2013 curriculum.

2. The Significance of Authentic Assessment in the 2013 Curriculum

Authentic assessment is suggested in the 2013 Curriculum. It is proved in its

Implementation Guideliness book that says: 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.

In line with its goal, the 2013 curricullum provides the terms Core competence and
basic competence. Core competence is the realization of the standard of competence that
must be achieved by the students by completing 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). Basic
competence, on the other hand, is the competences broke down from the core competence
and provides the competencies of subject matter for each level or grade that to be attained.

Implementation guidelines number 1 says that assessment is directed to measure

student’s competence stated in the curriculum. This means that our assessment should be
able to measure the students’ moral or religious values, their social attitude, their knowledge,
and their skills. Unlike the knowledge that can easily be measured using tests or traditional
assessment, such as multiple choice tests, matching, completion, short answer, etc. to assess

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social attitude or moral values, alternative assessment is needed. Brown (2004: 251) then
proposes alternative in assessment such as portfolios, journals, observations, self
assessments, peer assessments, and the like, in an effort to triangulate data about students.

The implementation guideliness number 2 says that assessment is basically criterion-

referenced assessment. It is as O’Malley and Pierce (1996: 1) state that alternative
assessment consists of any method of finding out what a student knows or can do and is
typically authentic because it is based on activities that represent classroom and real-life
setting. And the tasks should be meaningful in the real-world by students, for example, oral
performance (interviews, story/ text retelling), writing samples, projects/exhibitions,
experiments/demonstrations and constructed-response items.

The implementation guideline number 3 says that the assessment should be 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. It is supported by O’Malley and Pierce (1996: 11-14) that further explain that
authentic assessment is the multiple forms of assessment that reflects student learning,
achievement, motivation, and attitudes on instructionally-relevant classroom activities.
Consequently, this is also in accordance with guideline number 4, that the result of the
assessment is used to give feed backs and follow-up activities for students to reach the
competence.

3. The Challenge towards the 2013 Curriculum Assessment

Due to its complexity, many teachers from almost all regions were voicing their
objections towards the new curicullum. They were not ready with the teachers’ competencies
to do all the requirements. As a consequence, the new curriculum had not been implemented
well. From the syllabus, it is the 2013 curriculum, but the implementations are basically are
the conventional curriculum. Whereas, this new curriculum is very promising to get new
paradigm to change the education perspective in Indoneisa, but despite the schools’ readiness
this curriculum creates new problems instead. That can be a challenge for the professional
teacher to break down the constraints in applying the curriculum. The challenges that arise
are as follows.

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 The first is that time allotment. Time allotment becomes another challenge in
conducting authentic assessment. As known that authentic assessment takes much time to do.
Most of teachers in Indonesia teach 6-12 classes in a week, each class is about 30 students.
While there are many aspects to be observed, and then analized to get the final scored, then it
can be imagine how stressful they are to analyze hundreds documents. That is why teachers
have to manage time-allotment well if they want to implement this assessment. They should
be able to prepare long schedule from planning to scoring before starting the instruction.
Also, they should give students understanding and guiding about what they will do in the
assessment.

The second challenge is about taking students’ fairness. In implementing authentic

assessment, teachers should ensure that each students gets same opportunity to learn and
express their comprehension of material taught. Furthermore, some new difficulties may be
introduced (O’Malley and Pierce, 1996: 27). For instance, the performance called for in
authentic assessment is highly language-dependent, either oral or written. How the students
respond to the assessment is depending on their level of English proficiency. Afterwards, the
students will have different response to the assessment. In doing so, teachers should
encourage students to express their critical thinking towards the problem given in the
assignment. Again, authentic assessment is used to measure students’ knowledge in
the particular area. Students who have limited opportunities to exposure may find that their
knowledge and skills that they possess miss altogether. Besides, the use of authentic
assessment may exacerbate the problems mentioned above because it usually asks in terms of
a small number of questions about applications of knowledge to a single theme rather than
asks a larger number of questions about a broader topic or theme. If the content connected to
the single theme or topic is unfamiliar, students may be unable to respond to any of questions
consisting of in the assessment.

The third is that the objectivity and reliability of scoring. Authentic assessments
require teacher judgment to produce a score. This introduces the possibility of subjectivity
and lack of consensus with other teachers so that teachers have to use inter-rater reliability to
ensure consistency and fairness. Moreover, according to O’Malley and Pierce (1996: 21) the
quality of the scoring needs staff developments activities that can help teachers reach
agreement in scoring any authentic assessment. However, in its realization, because of the
goverment policy in each region, teachers are demanded to give the high score to the
students, in spite of their competencies. It is because that there is an obligation for all schools

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to make their students pass the minimum score or KKM (Kriteria Ketuntasan Minimal).
Whereas, many students, especially in the rural area, who are low level of English
performace get less score than the KKM. As a result, score manipulation is happened and this
opposes the fundamental priciples that in this curriculum the assessment should be the
authentic ones. Therefore, the score itself does not represent the students’ competencies.

These problems drives on challenges for every parties to change their perspective
about the teaching and learning process in Indonesia. They should be more creative,
professional, competitive, and skillful to design and use the assessment so that the goal that
we reach highly represent the fundamental principles in the 2013 curriculum in term of its
authenticity, both in the assessments and the scoring system. Beside, a professional
development or training for teachers on the use of authentic assessment is mostly needed.
The last but not the least is that the supports and movement by every parties, such as, the
teachers, the goverments, and the parents, whether they will changes their views about the
education perspectives.

4. Conclusion

Authentic assessments are what we need in the implementation of curriculum 2013.

With authentic assessments we can measure students competences stated in the curriculum,
monitor the on-going process of student learning, find student difficulties and help them to
attain the learning objectives and develop the core and basic competences. To measure the
competencies, authentic assessments are needed. Nevertheless, implementing authentic
assessment promotes some challenges. Those challenges will lead some difficulties to the
teachers if they apply authentic assessment. They are time allotment, fairness as well as
objectivity and reliability of scoring. Consequently, teachers should be ready with the
challenges and prepare themselves well before implementing authentic assessment

References

Brown, H. Douglas. 2004. Language Assessment: Principles and Classroom Practices.

Longman

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Brown, James Dean & Hudson, Thom. 1998. The Alternative in Language Assessment.
TESOL Quarterly, 32, 653-675

Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan Republik Indonesia, 2013. Kurikulum 2013

Hijriati, Hanifatul. (2014). Authentic Assessment and the Implications to Students’ Self
Esteem in Teaching English at Senior High School. In Proceedings of the 61st TEFLIN
International Conference, 7-9 October 2014 (pp. 1155-1158). Solo: Sebelas Maret
University
O’Malley, J. Michael and Pierce, Lorraine Valdez. 1996. Authentic Assessment for English
Language Learners. Longman.