Reading Assessment

Researchers in classrooms, who are usually teachers and testers, have used more traditional methods (e.g., surveys and interviews) to identify preferred stimuli or assessment. These types of assessments are likely to be appealing to teachers because they take the least amount of time to administer. In this paper, we are looking at teachers’ preferred assessment method to promote better teaching methods and skills among educators. As this study is to identify the teachers’ preferences of reading skill assessment format, there are studies that focus on the relationship between assessment preferences and other individual differences about the teachings. There are studies to show the effect of assessment preferences and self-efficacy for learning,

When teachers are able to help in students’ understanding of the texts, they can provide suggestions to other educators to use effective approaches and strategies in assessing reading comprehension. The study has several limitations that will be likely to occur while the research was conducted. The study only focused on the assessment choices in the English subject and not in any other subjects, and in particular assessment of reading comprehension. The sample of the population in this study was another limitation, because the research is limited to only lower primary schools within Malaysia, due to financial constraint. The financial and time constraint was due to the fact that, the researcher is a student and carried out this research as the partial fulfillment of one particular course requirement within the span of one semester only.. This study is also limited to only thirty ESL primary school teachers who are teaching lower primary in urban schools in Kuala Lumpur. Therefore, findings may be different if it is conducted in other specific institutions or districts. The introduction has provided an outline of the study, which includes a statement of the

There are four schooling levels in Malaysia; and at the end of each level, students are required to sit for: UPSR, PMR, SPM and STPM. The purpose of school-based assessment is to avoid students totally dependent on those high stake examinations alone (for their grade) which created a lot of tensions and anxiety among them. Public examinations have long been the only measurement of student’s achievement. But in line with the on-going transformation of the national education system this could be changed, stated by the Education Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin during the launching the state level 38th Teachers’ day at Dewan Seri Panglima Lee Shen on 5th June 2009. A new evaluation method will be introduced to gauge the competence of the students by taking into account both the academic and extracurricular achievements. (Daily Express 6th June