Page 69 - Jurnal Kurikulum BPK 2018

constraint of work setting and work knowledge is further enhanced by experiences. Teacher
collaboration or ‘socially moderated activities’ is one of the dynamics in enhancing teachers’
professional judgement in deciding the grades of students’ work. The aim of collaboration is to
ensure coherence in assessment practice among the teachers and students. Teachers discuss with
one another to assure consistency and comparability of judgements about students’ learning
outcome. However, fairness in grading is always being questioned as it was never identical in the
judgements of teachers but the interactions among teachers allow professionalism to take place
(Cobb et al., 1997, cited in Alla & Lopez, 2014). Teachers build up their professional judgement
through informal interactions with students to determine consistent and inconsistent student
profiles based on cognitive and socio-emotional characteristics of students (Südkamp, Praetorius
& Spinath, 2017).
Teacher’s judgement accuracy can also be enhanced through inferences that one draws
from available cues such as a student’s correct response to a question asked and also a student’s
facial expression on whether he or she understood a learning material, as long as the assessment
is aligned with the learning objective and diagnostic in nature (Thiede, Brendefur, Osguthorpe,
Carney, Bremner, Strother, Oswalt, Snow, Sutton & Jesse, 2015)
However, researchers have shown that teachers’ judgement on students can be biased
based on students’ characteristics as well as classroom and school contexts where there were
teachers who overestimated students’ literacy achievements in higher achieving and higher social
economic status classrooms and underestimated students’ skills in lower achieving and lower
social economic status classrooms (Meissel, Meyer, Yao, Rubie-Davies, 2017; Ready & Wright,
2011).
This gives every reason that professional development is needed to improve teachers’
professional judgement accuracy. Professional development on detecting the cues of students can
help to enhance teachers’ judgement accuracy in developing students’ learning although more
research is needed to identify cues for conceptual understanding (Thiede et. al., 2015). Teachers’
professional judgement on students’ learning is considered important as these judgements would
guide subsequent instructions, thus enhancing students’ learning further. Inaccuracy of teacher’s
professional judgment may lead to many challenges when implementing classroom assessment.

Challenges in Classroom Assessment

Black and Wiliam (1998a, 2003) and Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall and Wiliam (2004)
have asserted that classroom assessment especially formative assessment has not been favourable
to educators based on researches done. Why? Many educators felt it is difficult to break away
from normal routine as it requires time and effort. Normal routine includes ‘encourage superficial
and rote learning’ (p.8) among students and overemphasis on grading functions (Black, 1998a).
Furthermore, when classroom culture focusses on grades or any teaching strategy is weak
such as in a question-and-answer session where a teacher does not give enough time for students
to answer or is looking for a particular respond, students especially the low attainment ones will
avoid thinking as it is not favourable to the teacher (Black, 1998). This inevitably lowers students’
self-esteem. They become demoralized and believe that they are not good enough.
Despite global movements towards the importance of assessment, whether formative or
summative, DeLuca and Johnson (2017) assert that educators lack adequate knowledge and skills
in assessments, especially pre-service educators who acquire assessment knowledge from short
and fragmented teacher education programmes where some of the trainers’ or instructors’
knowledge on assessment is questionable.

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