The role of senior leader team on the formative assessment practices among primary school teachers in Petaling / Nadiah Jahidin

Formative assessment has become a recent area of focus when several countries recognized the effectiveness of assessment for learning in students’ holistic development. Teachers often misunderstood the difference between assessment of learning and assessment for learning which presents a challenging shift in practice for many educators. In Malaysia, teachers feel uncomfortable implementing formative assessment compared to summative assessment due to the issues of heavy workload and time consuming. Numerous literatures have described teachers’ experience of implementing formative assessment strategies in their daily instructional lessons. However, there is a gap in the current body of knowledge pertaining to the leaders’ responsibility and involvement in the implementation of formative assessment in schools. Hence, the purpose of this study is to examine the role of leaders and its association with teachers’ formative assessment practices in schools. An online questionnaire was administered to 198 randomly selected teachers in public primary schools within Petaling and a descriptive correlational research design was used to explore the relationship between the variables. The findings indicate that there was a moderately strong linear relationship between the role of leaders and teachers’ formative assessment practices in schools. It was also revealed that the role of leaders significantly predicted the teachers’ formative assessment practices with 20.4% contribution. Teachers possess less understanding on the embedded stages in the formative assessment process while leaders need to evaluate more to improve the formative assessment implementation in schools. This study contributes to the literature by enhancing the understanding in instructional practices of teachers relative to formative assessment process in order to guide teachers’ instruction and students’ learning. This study also will enlighten the leaders’ role in supporting the formative assessment implementation in schools.