The Role of Senior Leader Team on The Formative Assessment Practices among Primary School Teachers in Petaling

Abstract

Formative assessment has become a most discussed topic when many countries recognized the importance of assessment for learning in enhancing students’ holistic development. Most of the times, teachers are not quite clear with the differences between assessment of learning and assessment for learning. In Malaysia, teachers still feel uncomfortable with the implementation of formative assessment compared to summative assessment due to the heavy workload to prepare the tests by themselves. Hence, this study was conducted to examine the role of leaders and how the leader’s role was associated with teachers’ formative assessment practices in schools. An online questionnaire was administered to a total of 198 randomly selected teachers from 25 public primary schools in Petaling. A descriptive correlational research design was employed to identify the relationship between these two variables. The findings indicated that there was a moderately strong linear relationship between the role of the leaders and teachers’ formative assessment practices in schools. The study also revealed that the role of leaders has significantly predicted the teachers’ formative assessment practices with 20.4% of contribution. The findings showed that teachers’ practices in formative assessment process still far from much desired, and leaders still need to further enhance their implementation of formative assessment in school. Overall, this study has its contribution for the enrichment of the body of knowledge of formative assessment and provided insights for the improvement of the implementation of formative assessment in schools.