Abstract
This paper reports one best-practice in assessing the public speaking performance of advanced students at an Indonesian public university. The study involves an English course for an advanced class which was primarily related to public speaking skills. Considering that speaking is a productive skill that should be assessed through authentic assessment principles, the lecturers decided to assign the students with a mini-seminar project as part of their final examination. This project required the students to conduct a real-life contextualised seminar in which the organisers, speakers, and audience are composed of the students themselves. This paper discusses the rationale behind the planning and implementation of this successful project which involved a synthesis of assessment of, for, and as learning and critically evaluates the procedures of the assessment, the rubric developed therein, and the challenges experienced by the lecturers within the classroom. After the implementation, it can be concluded that this mini-seminar project as a doable alternative authentic assessment model that is applcable in a speaking class which focuses on the development of students’ public speaking skills. This mini-seminar project is recommended not only because it can be used as an alternative assessment model, but also it encourages students to work together in teams, and encourage them to work creatively, create something new in order to perform better.
Highlights
As one of the core components of education, assessment can be generally understood as a systematic and continuous process or activity to collect, analyze, and interpret information about the process as well as the results of students' learning
Some projects have been conducted by other researchers to develop authentic assessment both in the Indonesian higher education and secondary schools context
These projects include a problem-based learning model through an authentic assessment based practicum to improve students' science process skills conducted by Duda and Susilo [9] in STKIP Persada Khatulistiwa Sintang, West Borneo, Indonesia
Summary
As one of the core components of education, assessment can be generally understood as a systematic and continuous process or activity to collect, analyze, and interpret information about the process as well as the results of students' learning. Some projects have been conducted by other researchers to develop authentic assessment both in the Indonesian higher education and secondary schools context These projects include a problem-based learning model through an authentic assessment based practicum to improve students' science process skills conducted by Duda and Susilo [9] in STKIP Persada Khatulistiwa Sintang, West Borneo, Indonesia. Another study [16] shows that teachers have encountered similar problems in conducting the authentic assessment This includes time and effort consuming issues, validity issues, reliability issues, resource administration, evidence transformation, and subjectivity. Keeping such complexities in mind, this paper discusses the implementation of a mini-drama project as a form of authentic assessment in a speaking course at a university in Indonesia. This paper will further discuss how the procedures were implemented, the rationale behind the model of the assessment carried out, and how students responded to this authentic assessment
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