THE VALUE OF ASSESSMENT IN OPTIMAL EDUCATION

Marites B. Luzano

As teaching is critical to provide an optimal learning, teachers need to be thoroughly aware of the processes involved in helping learners succeed in various learning tasks. They need to know whether their students successfully achieve the knowledge, skills, and values inherent in their lessons. For this reason, teachers must build a repertoire of effective strategies for performing their executive function of assessment, measurement, and evaluation of student learning (Garcia, 2013).

On the other hand, learning is a continuous process of improving oneself to attain educational goals. Since time immemorial, learning experiences have been boxed to the traditional paper-and-pencil test. But as the 21st-century paradigm shift has begun, learning is being viewed as a progressive process of meaningful learning experiences using various materials to interlock all the potentialities of the learners for them to attain optimal and holistic development.

In that context, assessment of learning focuses on the development and utilization of assessment tools to improve the teaching-learning process. It stresses the use of tests to assess knowledge, understanding, and other cognitive abilities. This will show whether the teaching has been effective and efficient, considered an essential matter. As constantly reiterated, considering assessment as part of the overall evaluation process, educators themselves needed to precisely determine if the learners are learning (changing their behavior) due to the series of teaching and interventions. Therefore, assessment can be a means of finding out what learning took place and specific knowledge and skills that educators wished to measure other changes in behavior relative to personality, social skills, interests, and learning styles (Gabuyo, 2012).

Indeed, the use of assessment strategies ensures that students are provided with all the necessary alternative learning modes, which is out of the traditional modality of just paper-and-pencil tests. Since the tenets of 21st-century learning are concentrated on real-life experiences, effective and responsive assessment strategies are badly needed. Nowadays, assessment tools have been used as the parameter of students' performances that were traditionally mismeasured.

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The author is Teacher III at San Pedro Palcarangan Elementary School, Lubao West District, Division of Pampanga