Using paper project assessment to measure the students' competence in narrative text writing in SMA Negeri 3 Sidoarjo

Assessment at the end of learning and teaching of English writing activity is unavoidable in the education field. Through an assessment a teacher can collect the information about quality and quantity of students' development in English writing skills. One of methods to assess the students' competence in writing is using paper project assessment. In academic English writing, a paper is commonly used as a task given to the students as a means for assessing the students' writing competence. This research analyzes the use of paper project assessment to measure the students' competence in English narrative text writing in SMU Negeri 3 Sidoarjo. The research explores the feature of paper project as an assessment tool to measure students' competence in English narrative text writing. It also seeks information if the use of paper project assessment helps to develop the students' skills in English narrative text writing. Descriptive qualitative approach was used to be the research design in this research. In depth-interviews with the English teacher and twelve groups with each consisting two up to three students were conducted to collect data about the two research questions being the focus of this study. Documentation in form of students' papers was also used as a data source to better understand the feature of paper project assessment being studied. The data from the interviews were transcribed from Bahasa Indonesia into English, categorized based on the theme of interview questions and qualitatively analyzed and presented in form of narrative. Data from the students' scores from the assessments are used to interpret the level of skills of the students in English narrative writing. The result of this research reveals that as a summative assessment tool, paper project was assigned to the students in order to measure their English narrative writing skills as well as to help them develop their English narrative writing skills by finding resources and ideas for the writing by interviewing the informants whose background match with the topics assigned. It could also be interpreted that the students in majority favor the paper project assessment as they not only learned about and practiced English narrative text writing but also learned about the social issues in their surrounding. The students’ scores from the assessment also show that in general the students were successfully use components of English narrative text in their papers. This shows that they had successfully achieved the objectives of the teaching and learning of English narrative writing as recommended in the National Curriculum. The drawback of the use of group works in the project was that the teacher was not able to monitor individual contribution in the project and the time frame of the project was also considered too long by the students