Formative Assessment to support Teaching Practices in Teacher Education (Indonesia)

Teaching practices in Teacher Education is designed to be completed by the students in the process of their study. To be successful in promoting teachers after they graduated, students must be assessed based on the standard of the experienced teachers. Formative assessment, comes to provide information and support during the learning, thereafter, would be the main beneficiary factor to promote the growth of that profession (Daveis 2010, p.410 and Tillema 2010, p.563). However, critics argue that students sometimes could not take control their learning as appropriate as the professional ones (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick 2006, p.199).       A study proved that formative assessment is effective to determine the quality of teaching and learning in teacher education such as devising illuminating feedback in which teaching practices could be improved and exemplifying teaching practices performance (Tillema 2010, p.563). Another study observed that in higher education environment, formative assessment let students to assess their own performance and generate intellectual level of course (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick 2006, p.199 and Carroll 1995, p.65).

Gaulden (2010, p.2) explains that in teaching performance, feedback is critically important related to teaching and learning, for example asking for questions and describing responses or monitor body language and  facial expressions from what lectures and peers comment (Gaulden 2010, p.2). On the other hand, Yorke (2003, p.484) argue that from the perspective of lectures, students received assessment only as intention which sometimes ignored particularly when given negative comments while from the perspective of peers, just contributive feedback that would be accepted to the learning. Therefore, informative, clear, and univocal feedback proves as positive recommendation which could be a helpful instrument rather than corrective feedback (Tillema 2010, p.564). This means that it is acceptable that formative assessment can give positive praise and contructive comments, guide and focus on certain qualities of student involve, identify the weaknesses and streght of their performance, and has a shared understanding between the lecturers and students (Tillema 2010, p.546). Thus, formative assessment feeds forward teaching and learning in providing informative feedback for teaching practices.

When doing formative assessment, the learners are potential to compile performance evidence on what everything they say, do, and create to reflect how the performance is growth (Davies 2010, p.414). In addition, this literature points out that it is essential to learn from documents which specify product of work-related experience. One best formative assessment tool that can support the evidence of development is portfolio, "a purposeful collection of work over a period of time" (Tillema, 2010, p.565). Yet, Yorke (2003, p.482) criticises that feedback on portfolio "...to some extent, not clear whether the student has developed sufficiently to deal satisfactory with analogues work without the support of teacher". By this means that presenting portfolio could not be said that students perform as much as the development requirement. Another study convinced that it is recommended for learners to create a professional development portfolio that show a detailed description in order to provide the attainment of the learning objectives (Tillema 2010, p.565). This study insists that although portfolio give less evidence of professional improvement, the forms such as analysis of lecturer and peers observation, work timetables, or teaching professional rubrics obviously contribute on the way students accomplish regarding the particular targets and present the successive stages in achieving the goals of teaching practices. No matter what the format, accordingly, formative assessment allows learners compile evidence that can assist them organise their next learning steps (Davies 2010, p.414)

While there are several criticism about formative assessment as learning achievement tool especially in higher education, its implementation in teacher education results effective to improve the quality of teaching practices learning. According to these examples, feedback used by formative assessment is able to reflect how well students are performing. Moreover, the way they collect evidence of descriptive documents as portfolio clearly influence in evaluating their own performance until they attain the criteria of learning objectives. Hence, regarding to provide professional teachers, it is advised for lecturers to use formative assessment which impacts positively to help students improve the experience of teaching practices in teacher education.