NUR MUTHMAINNAH (UNIVERSITAS PENDIDIKAN INDONESIA)
WINNY BERLIANA (Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia (Indonesian Education University))

DIFFERENTIATED ASSESSMENT IN THE EFL SECONDARY LEVEL; ARE THEY CHALLENGING? : LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT AND EVALUATION

Differentiation is currently popular in Indonesian education as it is acknowledged by the Ministry of Education to support the latest curriculum implementation; emancipated curriculum. Differentiated assessment as part of classroom differentiation has also been implemented to assess students differently. This study investigates how an English teacher implements differentiated assessment in her English classroom and identifies the challenges of leveraging this assessment model. An English teacher from a state junior high school in Semarang Regency, Central Java, Indonesia who had been trained as a teacher trainer (guru penggerak) was interviewed to reveal how differentiated assessment is implemented in her classrooms. Several questions were arranged based on the theories of differentiated assessment suggested by Moon et al. (2020) and Kaur et al. (2018). This study reveals that the teacher has tried to carry out every phase of differentiated assessment: pre-assessment, ongoing assessment, and summative assessment. However, several challenges were identified during the implementation such as recognizing the prior knowledge of students with special needs, minimum students’ involvement in planning ongoing assessments, and planning summative assessment. Differentiated assessment has brought a new concept of language assessment although some challenges are still revealed. Further studies observing teachers’ implementation of differentiated assessment in the classroom might add more comprehensive information on how this model is carried out in EFL classrooms.

Nur Muthmainnah is an English Lecturer at Universitas Islam Negeri (UIN) Salatiga Indonesia, who is currently pursuing her doctoral degree at English Language Education Study Program Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia. She has her interest in EFL language teaching particularly on language evaluation and assessment, classroom differentiation, and curriculum development.

Winny Berliana is an English doctoral student at Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Bandung City, Indonesia. She graduated bachelor's degree from Universitas Jambi and master's degree from Universitas Negeri Padang, Indonesia; majoring in English language education. Her research interests are language learning strategies, teaching by using technology in education, and assessment/testing.