Do Teachers Need Assessment?

Do Teachers Need Assessment?

By: Budi Trisna

Teachers do not only teach and share about the material in the classroom. Teacher has to know their students’ understanding. Did everything that have been taught in the classroom is reachable for his/her student? In the fact, some teachers considered to provide a test to know about their students’ understanding. Hence, does test relate with assessment? Is there any effective test that should be conducted in classroom to check our students’ understanding? As a final point, do teacher need assessment?

Assessment is one of instrument that teachers might be use to know the progress of their student understanding in classroom. There are two things that should be considered when a teacher wanted to conduct assessment. They are validity and reliability. Assessment should be valid, it means teacher have to know in which part she/he have to conduct an assessment. In the other word, we could say teacher measure what is supposed to be measured.

Reliability means the assessment will show the same result in any condition and situation. For example, teacher wants to assess their student understanding about writing. It is no matter when teacher conducts it in the morning or afternoon the result of test will be the same.

Nowadays, assessment has a lot of kind. Two of them are traditional assessment and modern assessment. Paper and pencil test is included in traditional test whereas portfolio, performance based test are included in modern assessment. However, we have to notice that any kind of assessment might be work in some condition and classroom although some of them too does not work at all. So that, as a teacher we have to know about our student need before we conduct assessment. Anyway, according to my opinion as a teacher we are really need assessment to check our student understanding and our capability in teaching because through assessment teacher can get such a reflection too.