Authentic Assessment

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

This chapter, the writer presented the review of related literature describing the theories, some pertinent ideas, the concept of Authentic Assessment and Theoretical framework relating to the title of this research.

A.    Previous of Related Research Findings 

Paul (1991) states that, Authentic Assessment is suitable for all the people who have assumption that study is something make boring, so Authentic Assessment is the best solution for their lives to build their happiness and life in learning.

Hurley (1998) give statement about this method that it can change people’s attitude about their selves and the best way in learning, Authentic Assessment is a great experience for all age.

Rose (1997) states that, she had spent her life experience to help people to aware his potential in learning and translate it in a great book that easy to understand.

Based on those opinions the writer concludes that Authentic Assessment is a strategy in learning teaching process that emphasize to the enjoyable situation in learning and suitable for all age.

B.     Some pertinent Ideas

1.      What is Speaking  

           Speaking is means of oral communication is giving ideas or information to order. It is the more essential way in which the speaker can express himself through the language. As Widdowson (1985.p.58) States that an act of communication trough speaking in commonly performed in talking face to face interaction on happens as part of dialogue or other verbal exchange.

           Boarding in Djabbir (2006), states that spoken language need mastery of vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, and social context of culture and situation, in short it needs the mastery of the linguistic and the culture competence.

Parts of communication

a.      Oral Communication 

Oral. According to Hornby, (1995: p. 289). It is spoken or not written. It means that oral usually involved the people, speaker. Communication, according to Echols (2000:p.131), is a relation among people to speak. So it can be concluded that oral communication is the activity done by people by involving sounds to speak.

b.      Half Communication

Hornby in Oxford Learner’s pocked dictionary (1995:p.188) explains that: Half means one of two equal parts. If the word “half” is related to communication, so communication will be done halfly. It means half communication is application of speaking not involving sounds filly to speak. The process of communication is fully to speak. The process of communication is completed mime and gesture.

c. Big Communication

Big communication combines both oral communication and half communication. All expression can be found in it. The big communication will involve sounds mime gesture full to speak.

Based on the explanation about part of speaking above, the writer concludes them in the following sketch as follows:

Figure 1

Based on the sketch (figure1.)  shows that parts of speaking can be mad as the stage. The first stage is oral communication, the second stage is half communication, and the third stage is big communication. So if someone wants to be a good speaker he/she has to star to from the firs stage, the second and the      third stage.

2.      What is Authentic Assessment?

Authentic Assessment is a method from Dr. George Lasanova (1978) experiment’ speaking educator from Bulgaria in his experiment’s called “suggestology” or suggestopedya this method have some principles that. Suggestion  influence the result of learning situation. And very details can give positive or negative suggestion. Some techniques in this method that can give positive suggestion, they: Learning in enjoyable situation, using music, improves the students’ participation in teaching learning process, using picture that can give information.

Authentic assessment is a form of assessment in which students are asked to perform real-world tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of essential knowledge and skills. Or, as Grant Wiggins (1993) describes it, authentic measures are “engaging and worthy problems or questions of importance, in which students must use knowledge to fashion performances effectively and creatively. The tasks are either replicas of or analogous to the kinds of problems faced by adult citizens and consumers or professionals in the field.” Authentic tasks can range from analyzing a political cartoon to making observations of the natural world to computing the amount of paint needed to cover a particular room to performing in a chorale.

C.    The concept  of Authentic Assessment

Authentic Assessment is a learning method that emphasize about learning in enjoyable situation and suitable for all age. Authentic Assessment give some concepts of learning that effective to increase students’ ability, because quantum learning is collaboration of suggestopedia that emphasize suggestion concept, Accelerated learning NLP and many other that their effectiveness had been proved. To improve students’ achievement and motivation. Some of learning concepts that applied Authentic Assessment such as: Super camp, using music, suggestion, and classroom arrangement.

Application in classrooms and similar settings

Assessment is an essential element in every classroom, even beyond assessment of formal grades. Effective teachers assess the classroom to determine when it is appropriate to move onto the next concept or to elaborate on the current lesson being taught. The desired goal of every classroom is not only to be fair and accurate when assessing students but to make sure that each student will be able to apply the knowledge and skills gained in the classroom later in life. What better for of assessment can there be for evaluating student work than to use an assessment tool that is authentic to the "real world." According to Wiggins (1994) who states that Authentic Assessments present the student with the full array of tasks that mirror the priorities and challenges found in the best instructional activities: conducting research; writing, revising and discussing papers; providing an engaging oral analysis of a recent political event; collaborating with others on a debate, etc. Through authentic assessment, students are more engaged in the task and a teacher can be more confident that the assessment she/he gives is meaningful and relevant.

Furthermore, students are more relaxed during authentic assessment, experiencing less test anxiety and nervousness. Authentic assessment is a more casual experience, where the student may be communicating with the teacher or other students in the process during which time learning and the transfer and building of knowledge continue to occur.

Why do we need Authentic Assessment

While multiple-choice tests can be valid indicators or predictors of academic performance, too often our tests mislead students and teachers about the kinds of work that should be mastered. Norms are not standards; items are not real problems; right answers are not rationales.

What most defenders of traditional tests fail to see is that it is the form, not the content of the test that is harmful to learning; demonstrations of the technical validity of standardized tests should not be the issue in the assessment reform debate. Students come to believe that learning is cramming; teachers come to believe that tests are after-the- fact, imposed nuisances composed of contrived questions--irrelevant to their intent and success. Both parties are led to believe that right answers matter more than habits of mind and the justification of one's approach and results.

A move toward more authentic tasks and outcomes thus improves teaching and learning: students have greater clarity about their obligations (and are asked to master more engaging tasks), and teachers can come to believe that assessment results are both meaningful and useful for improving instruction.

When a teacher has finished giving a lesson to his students, it is the duty of the teacher to find out how much his students have learned. In order to know this, a teacher needs to give a test to his students at the end of the learning process. The same thing happens in the field of foreign language learning that teachers also need to conduct some kind of a test to their students at the end of a course level or at the end of each chapter or part of a course. According to Oller (1979:1), this kind of language test refers to a device that is used by language teachers to assess how much their students has learned in a foreign language course or a part of a language course.

Authentic assessment uses activities that reveal what students can do with language, emphasizing their strengths instead of their weaknesses. Authentic Assessment instruments are not only designed and structured differently from traditional tests, but are also graded or scored differently. Because Authentic assessment is performance based, it helps instructors emphasize that the point of language learning is communication for meaningful purposes.

Authentic assessment methods work well in learner-centered classrooms because they are based on the idea that students can evaluate their own learning and learn from the evaluation process. These methods give learners opportunities to reflect on both their linguistic development and their learning processes (what helps them learn and what might help them learn better). Authentic assessment thus gives instructors a way to connect assessment with review of learning strategies.

Features of Authentic assessment:

• Assessment is based on authentic tasks that demonstrate learners' ability to accomplish communication goals
• Instructor and learners focus on communication, not on right and wrong answers
• Learners help to set the criteria for successful completion of communication tasks
• Learners have opportunities to assess themselves and their peers

Benefits of Authentic Assessment

The benefits that can be taken from this method are :

a.      collaboration between student and teacher

b.      features student’s individual research and knowledge

c.      acknowledges different learning styles and interests

d.      avoids unfair comparisons

e.      audience extends beyond the teacher

f.       student has foreknowledge of the type of questions and tasks involved in the assessment

g.      incorporates a multifaceted scoring system

h.      incorporates self-assessment

The assessment requires time, as well as interaction between the assessor and the person or property being assessed, so that the congruence of perception with reality or, in our case, the congruence between underlying mental processes and surface observation, can be verified. The idea here is that the product is not sufficient evidence of the quality of the thinking processes that produced it.

• First, authentic assessments are viewed as "direct" measures of student performance, since tasks are designed to incorporate the contexts, problems, and solution strategies that students would use in real life. Traditional standardized tests, in contrast, are seen as "indirect" measures, since test items are designed to "represent competence" by extracting knowledge and skills from their real-life contexts.
• Second, items on standardized instruments tend to test only one domain of knowledge or skill so as to avoid ambiguity for the test taker. Authentic assessment tasks are by design "ill-structured challenges" (Frederiksen 1984), since their goal is to help students prepare for the complex ambiguities of the “real” world.
• Third, authentic assessments focus on processes and rationales. There is no single correct answer; instead, students are led to craft polished, thorough, and justifiable responses, performances, and products. Traditional tests, on the other hand, are one-time measures that rely on a single correct response to each item; they offer no opportunity for demonstration of thought processes, revision, or interaction with the teacher. Because they usually require brief responses, which are often machine-scored, students construct their responses in only the most minimal way, and often by only plugging in a piece of knowledge. There is limited potential for traditional tests to measure higher-order thinking skills since, by definition, those skills involve analysis, interpretation, and multiple perspectives.
• Fourth, the new assessment models involve long-range projects, exhibits, and performances that are linked to the curriculum. Students are aware of how and on what knowledge and skills they are to be assessed. Assessment is conceived of as both an evaluative device and a learning activity. Traditional tests, in contrast, must be kept under lock and key so students do not have knowledge about or access to them ahead of time. Thus, traditional tests may seek to improve student performance in a general way via the washback effect -- they will study in a particular way in the hope that this will improve their test performance -- but there is virtually no way that students can “learn by doing” while taking a traditional test in the way that they learn while engaging in a performance-based assessment.
• Fifth, in the new assessment models, the teacher is an important collaborator in creating of tasks, as well as in developing guidelines for scoring and interpretation. Teachers may write traditional tests for their own students and then be responsible for fitting the content and format of the test to the curriculum, but many large-scale tests are developed externally and do not involve at all the teachers whose students are being evaluated. In addition, little or no teacher judgment is required to decide whether a response on a traditional test is correct or incorrect. All of this promotes greater distance between teachers and traditional assessment activities in general and has historically made the study of assessment a pretty dry and unappealing topic in teacher education programs.
• Finally, there is the sticky area of validity and reliability, both of which are essential features of good assessment instruments. Validity has to do with the faithfulness of a test to its purpose; in other words, how well it measures what it actually purports to measure. Reliability refers to the consistency and precision of test scores; in other words, how closely the score an individual gets on a particular assessment measure reflects what could be considered his or her “true score.” Traditional tests can’t be beaten when it comes to reliability, not to mention efficiency. When responses are obviously right or wrong, there is little chance that the scores on a test will vary between one rater and another or if the student takes two parallel versions of the same test. This means that traditional tests lend themselves to a wide range of statistical analyses and comparisons because we can be fairly confident that the true score on a test is very close to the reported score.

And there are some factors that authentic assessment is need to do in the learning process to build the student’s ability.

1.      Processes and products. This focus deals with cognitive processes, performances, constructs, or products that students engage in, produce, or are assessed on. Some authors have specific processes or products in mind that are claimed to be important, and some others are more unspecific about these processes or products. In both cases the processes or products are regarded as the important issue in authenticity. The assessment is regarded as authentic if, for example, students are engaged in cognitive processes that are important in successful adult behavior in life beyond school (Focus 1 combined with Perspective 1), meet curricula goals (Focus 1 combined with Perspective 2), or are effective in the learning process (Focus 1 combined with Perspective 3).

2.      Conditions. With this focus authenticity is dependent on the conditions, under which the student activity takes place, being true to some main perspective above. This could mean, for example, that time constraints and access to relevant tools are the same in the assessment situation as in some situation in life beyond school (Focus 2, Perspective 1) or in ordinary classroom practice (Focus 2, Perspective 2). The third perspective, learning and instruction, would, combined with this focus on ‘conditions’, require that assessment procedures promote a situation that is effective for learning (this could, for example, mean that student involvement in all phases of the assessment is required).

3.      Figurative context. Here the focus is on the figurative context, that is, the situation described in the task (Clarke & Helme, 1998). The figurative context has to be faithful to some subject or field of application outside the particular school subject, for example mathematics, in which the task is given. Authenticity lies in the figurative context consisting of problems and objects actually belonging to that field, for example a potential task situation in physics studies or in life beyond school capturing the important contextual aspects of that situation. (This focus is always combined with Perspective 1, but sometimes accepts other school subjects than mathematics to also be included in this perspective).

Authentic assessment uses activities that reveal what students can do with language, emphasizing their strengths instead of their weaknesses. Authentic assessment instruments are not only designed and structured differently from traditional tests, but are also graded or scored differently. Because Authentic assessment is performance based, it helps instructors emphasize that the point of language learning is communication for meaningful purposes.

Authentic assessment methods work well in learner-centered classrooms because they are based on the idea that students can evaluate their own learning and learn from the evaluation process. These methods give learners opportunities to reflect on both their linguistic development and their learning processes (what helps them learn and what might help them learn better). Authentic assessment thus gives instructors a way to connect assessment with review of learning strategies.

Features of Authentic assessment:

• Assessment is based on authentic tasks that demonstrate learners' ability to accomplish communication goals
• Instructor and learners focus on communication, not on right and wrong answers
• Learners help to set the criteria for successful completion of communication tasks
• Learners have opportunities to assess themselves and their peers