Case study on school - based assessment in physics in learning teaching process in North Western Province

Abstract

School-based assessment (SBA) is an important concept introduced to fulfil the requirement of assessment scheme with formative and qualitative features to the school education system. However according to the information gathered from informal interviews, it was very unpleasant topic to most of the teachers. Since this contradiction directly affects on students’ education, the necessity of studying this problem was identified and therefore the research was done to see the way of implementing of SBA relevant to Physics education. The research project had several objectives such as identifying how school-based assessment program was implemented in learning teaching process of Physics, while revealing students’ and teachers’ attitudes on it and identifying the problems caused by it. It was also aimed to identify strengths and weaknesses of the program and give suggestions for better implementation in the classroom. The research study was carried out from 2007 September to 2008 January with a randomly selected sample from north- western province 1AB schools. Data collection was done using several research tools such as questionnaires with attitude scales, observations, formal.and informal interviews, referring documents and records etc. The qualitative data were analyzed by data triangulation and quantitative data were analyzed by t-tests. According to the findings, the school- based assessment program is not being implemented effectively. The majority of the teachers had negative attitude on it and their awareness of it was inadequate due to ineffective training. Higher number of students in a class, lack of laboratory facilities and poor monitoring process were the other main causes for the unsuccessfulness of the program. The additional finding of the research was that the laboratory instruments given to schools most recently were not up to the standard. Therefore, they were not reliable and give less accurate readings. It also affects on practical assessments. Six model assessments were prepared for the selected sub unit ‘Elasticity’ and the possibility of implementing varieties of assessments with students to improve learning teaching process was evident by the model assessments practiced in the selected group. The experimental group which practiced SBA during learning teaching process showed greater performance in the post test.