The Impact Of Applying Portfolio Assessment On Students’ Writing Ability

Portfolio Assessment, Writing Ability, Local Issues, Global Issues.The objectives of this study were to investigate whether the implementation of portfolio assessment has an impact on students writing ability in terms of local and global issues as well as their responses on that technique. The method used in this study was quasi experimental research design that consisted of experimental and control group including 62 students of SMPK Frateran Celaket 21 Malang. The groups were divided by using a purposive sampling. Each group consisted of 31 students that taken from 8A as the experimental group and 8B as the control group. Besides, the experimental group was taught through portfolio assessment and control group was taught through process based approach. The data was collected through writing test (pre-test and post-test) and a questionnaire. Then, the data were analyzed by using independent sample t-test in SPSS 22 in order to see the significance difference between two groups. The statistical result revealed that generally the implementation of portfolio assessment increased students’ ability in writing. In this case, by using portfolio assessment, the students got regular feedback from the teacher when applying portfolio assessment in order to help the students correct their errors. Besides, they got another opportunity to revise their draft as well as rewrite their final product. Therefore, their writing ability in terms of local and global issues, such as content, organization, and vocabulary also improved significantly. It was also found that global issues was increasing more than local issues. In this case, there are two aspects of local issue that do not really increase significantly, such as grammar and mechanic. Due to the aspect of grammar, the students mostly confused when write a sentence in past tense with regular and irregular verb form. Meanwhile, the problem of mechanism mostly occurred when the students do not pay more attention to spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. On the other hand, the students’ writing ability in control group in terms of both issues did not really increase. Relating to this result, most of students in control group were unconcerned about the materials given to them. Besides, they were lack of vocabulary and grammar in past tense. It was also found that the students were not really enthusiastic during the writing activity. Considering the findings, it could be concluded that portfolio assessment gave the positive impact for students on the area of writing ability. In addition, the result of questionnaire proved that students’ responses was good toward the implementation of this technique. Therefore, it is suggested that portfolio assessment should be implemented in teaching learning process especially in English writing since it could give a regular feedback and could help the students in monitoring their progress in writing