By Jose M. Bundalian, Teacher III, Las Pinas Integrated School

Engaging learners in the learning process promotes meaningful learning experiences.
Thus, teaching more meaningful when the teacher allows each learner to cooperate in the
discussion. Assessment is an important element of learning since it evaluates whether or not
the learning outcomes are met on the basis of standards or not. Both the teacher and the student
use assessment to monitor their performances in different aspects and criteria of measurements,
toward the attainment of learning objectives and enhance the teaching and learning process.
The objective of assessment is to determine how far a student has achieved toward a learning
goal. Student assessment is a critical element of the teaching and learning process though the
word “assessment” often calls as paper-and-pencil test. It helps teachers to assess the efficacy
of teaching to clear learning goals with the success of the student. Evaluating performance is
important because it offers feedback on the degree to which students are effectively achieving
the goals of the course.
There are two types of assessment systems such as the formative and summative
assessment. Formative assessment’s role in encouraging metacognition and peer cooperation.
Formative assessment provides continuous feedback on the students’ performance whereas,
summative assessment assesses the student performance at the end. The assessment process
encourages teachers and curriculum planners to think an assessor before designing specific
chapters. This not only help teachers to assess the effectiveness of their teaching process, but
also strengthens classroom teaching pedagogy. However, there are challenges among
elementary teachers became prevalent in assessing their learners in assessment of their
performance. A lot of adjustments made by the teachers in order to promote holistic
development of each learner. In the study of Abedi (2018) showed that assessments are
scholarly procedures in the teaching and learning process that inform and share areas in
performance which needing enhancement or consistency of measures. Moreso, it suggests that
content-based assessments should produce outcomes that are indicative of students’
developments. Meanwhile, Yorke (2015) showed that through assessment potential actions can
be discussed in reference with the three levels: the institution, the department and the
individual-learner.
In another view, forms of assessments at this time sometimes confronted several
challenges, one of which is the authenticity of learners’ academic development if solely based
on the results of their assessment. In other words, it is difficult for the teachers to measure the
authentic learning acquisition of the learners when being assessed through paper and pen
assessment style due to limited monitoring and strict supervision when accomplishing the
same. This is considerable in nature because of the pandemic-scene education. Most numbers
of learner relied deeply on peers’ answers or being able to use modern applications to
supplement answers. Knowing this condition, the teachers also strive harder to mobilize
students’ potentials through giving authentic and reflective assessment procedure rather than
just answering based on their absorbed knowledge relative to the topic. This further explained
in the study of Quansah (2019) which he argued that assessment is one of the critical
components of classroom instruction. Educational community should be aware that appropriate
assessment methods be implemented to prevent inconsistency of measurement. Further,
performance assessment measures the performances made by the students which has different
context during this pandemic, students ought to submit their performances based on the
required task given to them through digital platform. Truly, that teachers should contextualize
their assessment procedures most specially during this time of pandemic so as to obtain the
authentic measures of their performance and treat the latter as basis for pedagogical
intervention