The Rise and Fall of Curriculum 2013: Insights on the Attitude Assessment from Practicing Teachers

The change of Indonesia’s national curriculum from School-Based Curriculum 2006 (hereafter SBC 2006) to Curriculum 2013 (hereafter CR 2013) has caused modifications in the assessment system which requires teachers to use authentic assessment. Many teachers are facing setbacks in the implementation of this assessment, particularly in the attitude aspect. This qualitative research mainly focused on investigating the problems in conducting the attitude assessment faced by teachers in CR 2013. Three English teachers from three junior high schools in Banda Aceh were selected and interviewed with questions adapted from Handayani (2014) and Eliza (2015). The document analysis of attitude assessment was also done to see the reports of students’ attitudes. The findings showed that the teachers knew the importance of authentic assessment as a necessity for assessing students’ learning outcomes in CR 2013, but they admitted that it was complicated since many categories need to be assessed in detail. They find it impossible to assess all of the students in every school day. When parents do not want to cooperate if their children are in need of attention from both parents and teachers, it is also an obstacle for the teachers to do the assessments. Furthermore, the teachers deemed that self- and peer-assessment were ineffective and the paper further discusses why it is so