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.
