TG02 Eileen, Sharmala and Brandon

Traditional assessment, also commonly known as the paper-and-pencil assessment, evaluates students mainly on their knowledge of the topics learnt and their skills on solving routine and conventional problems. Students’ responses are either right or wrong. Such assessments are time-limited and venue-limited as they are usually done within a stipulated block of time within the classrooms. They also drive education to emphasize just two abilities: recall of facts and concepts, and ability to solve short, well-defined problems. Students’ grades are important as they serve as a marker of how well they have learnt. Tests and examinations are examples of traditional assessments.

Alternative assessment on the other hand, aims to measure not only the correctness of students’ responses, but also their thought processes involved in arriving at those responses. Such assessments are neither time-limited nor venue-limited and can be conducted over a few weeks or months, even outside of the four walls of the classrooms. The tasks associated with alternative assessment are usually complex and open-ended, enabling students to explore different methods of problem solving in authentic contexts, within a range of control that allows reliable scoring by the assessors. Examples of alternative assessment are journal writing, portfolio assessment, classroom observations, interviews, projects assessment, oral presentation and student self-assessment.

However, as both the traditional type of assessment and alternative assessment have their respective advantages and disadvantages, our group feels that there is really no such a thing as the better way to assess our students’ learning. Instead, we suggest using a combination of both to evaluate in totality, how much and how well our students have learnt. On top of periodical tests and examinations, we feel that the following modes of alternative assessment in particular, can be implemented on a day-to-day basis.

Classroom Observations and Interviews
Classroom observations and interviews, for instance, can be regularly conducted to assess students’ progress. Teachers can make observations when students are engaged in group activities. Any observations made can be recorded for monitoring purposes. Sometimes follow-up actions such as conducting a one-to-one interview with the child may be necessary to help teachers better understand the child’s thought process. Unlike administering a test, classroom observations and interviews can be done without interrupting class time.

Journal Writing
Another mode of alternative assessment that can be done regularly is journal writing. It allows teachers to assess students’ learning without the students feeling they are being evaluated. One of our group mates got her Primary two students to write a journal about their Mathematics lesson and ended up with some rather interesting information.



While the information gathered from the above students’ journals may not provide a lot of depth for assessing students’ progress, it did however, reveal their attitude towards Mathematics learning. It is not possible to obtain such information through administering tests and examinations. Of course, instructions for journal writing can be fine-tuned and modified to elicit more qualitative information. An example would be to get Primary 3 students to complete a journal entry that begins with ‘Equivalent fractions are...”.

Conclusion
To conclude, our group feels that there is no such a thing as ‘one size fits all’ in education. Diversity in student demographics and abilities call for differentiated teaching strategies. It is thus not fair to use a singular mode of assessment to evaluate students’ learning and progress. Teachers should therefore be more open to the idea of using alternative assessments, on top of the written tests and examinations, so as to achieve a holistic assessment of students’ learning.