Perception of authentic assessment and its practices among teachers in public Senior High Schools in Cape Coast Metropolis

Abstract

The study aimed at investigating the perception of public Senior High School teachers of authentic assessment. It also found out the extent to which public Senior High School teachers practice authentic assessment in their assessment procedure. The stratified sampling procedure was adopted to group Senior High Schools into categories A, B and C. Simple random sampling was used to select three schools from category “A” and two schools from category “B” but the two schools in category “C” were purposively sampled. In all, seven schools were used. Proportional stratified random sampling was used to obtain the sample size for each school. Then convenience sample was used to select two hundred and twenty-six participants for the study. Four research questions and two hypotheses guided the study. An 85-item questionnaire was used for data collection. The reliability coefficient of the questionnaire was 0.86. The study showed that to a great extent, teachers have positive perception of authentic assessment. About 70% of the teachers indicated that they give their students assessment tasks that involve social processes equivalent to those in real life situation. Also, teachers reported that they practice authentic assessment by asking students to create, organize ideas with a purpose and demonstrate their ability to organize ideas effectively. Again, the findings indicated a significant difference within categories B and C schools in terms of authentic assessment practices but there was no significant difference within categories A and B schools and categories A and C schools. Heads of Senior High Schools should organize workshops, seminars and other activities for teachers on authentic assessment.