Implementation of school-based assessment: the experienced teachers’ thoughts

Background: In School-Based Assessment (SBA), teachers have the autonomy to carry out formative and summative assessment.In a sense, teachers’ integrity and credibility is recognized and enhanced.Teachers are indeed suitable to continuously monitor their students’ performance in schools. SBA was officially introduced by the Ministry of Education Malaysia, and implemented in stages, in-line with the Standards based Primary School Curriculum, starting in the year 2011 as part of Malaysia’s educational reform.Literature has shown that teachers still have difficulty in accepting the changes made in the school assessment policy, they do not get sufficient information on SBA and as well as relevant trainings.Objective: This paper deals with the implementation of SBA in Malaysia and the issues related to its early years of implementation, which include teachers understanding of SBA and their readiness to implement SBA in their respective schools.This paper sets out to provide a glimpse of the purposively selected group of seven teachers’ understanding of SBA and to what extent are they ready to implement SBA in their schools. Results: In this exploratory qualitative study, it was found that there are respondents who lacked knowledge about SBA.Some of them were less satisfied with the ways knowledge about SBA was disseminated to them by the authorities.Some of the respondents also reported that despite some hiccups with the training's they received, they are ready to implement SBA in their schools. Conclusion: The findings in the study contribute to knowledge about teachers’ understanding of SBA and their state of readiness during the early years of the implementation of SBA within Malaysia’s education system