SCHOOL BASED ASSESSMENT

Based on the finding from this research , the teachers in this study were aware of the advantages and disadvantages of school based assessment (SBA). 

ADVANTAGES

1. Help all students learn more by demanding higher student proficiency and providing effective methods to help students achieve high standards
2. Provide parents, schools, and communities with an unprecedented opportunity to debate and reach agreement on what students should know and be able to do
3.  Focus the education system on understandable, objective, measurable, and well-defined goals to enable schools to work smarter and more productively
4. Reinforce the best teaching and educational practices already found in classrooms and make them the norm
5. Provide real accountability by focusing squarely on results and helping the public and local and state educators evaluate which programs work best.

                                                                  DISADVANTAGES

1. In many schools the careless implementation of standards and assessment may have negative consequences for students.
2. Vague and unclear standards in several subject areas in several states complicate matters and do not serve as concrete standards defining what students should know and be able to do.
3. Top-down standards imposed by the federal or state government are also problematic.  They impose content specifications without taking into account the different needs, opportunities to learn, and skills that may be appropriate for specific districts or regions.

In school based assessment, the teachers need to manage, synthesizing, interpreting and using student's assessment data that need to obtain from a multifaceted assessment system, thus this complex duties can be a stressful task for the educator if the assessment systems is lack coherence, school staff do not experience in student assessment, and the time, attention and energies of teachers and administrators are need to stretch to personal limits.  Even though teachers in our country aware about the importance of school based assessment, but they emphasized about the time constraints and a heavy teaching load that they need to carry when this concept of assessment is implemented in classroom as a culprits in its effectiveness implementation. Besides the issues of time constraint and heavy teaching load, they also raise the issues of reliability and validity of school based test. Hence, it is important for a school system to constantly assess the quality of instruction, learning and assessment provided in its schools.