Internal Assessment at Secondary Level: Students’ Perception and Teachers’ Experiences

Abstract

The thesis entitled “Internal Assessment at Secondary Level: Students’ Perception and Teachers’ Experiences” aimed to find the perception of students and experiences of mathematics teachers towards the practices of internal assessment at secondary level. This study was based on mixed method research design. This study was delimited to grade ten students and their teachers of four community schools of Banke district. A total of 169 grade X students and four mathematics teachers were randomly selected as sample of the study. Survey questionnaire and interview guideline were used as research tools to collect the data from students and teachers respectively. The result of this study concludes that both students and teachers have positive perception towards the practice of internal assessment system in mathematics. Internal assessment increases the regularity of students in the classroom. Internal assessment helped teachers to maintain the students’ discipline. There are several components and indicators to conduct internal assessments, although teachers have not followed all the criteria. The curriculum expects assessment for learning but the real practice shows it as assessment of learning. Terminal examinations is effective to know the students’ excellencies, weakness and also to work for learning improvement but teachers faced challenges to construct quality tools for terminal examination. Project work emerged as a vital component of internal assessment and students are interested to participate on more project works. But students are not satisfied with inadequate practice of project work, bias grading practices of teachers. Internal assessment increased the collaborative learning and creative thinking power of students in mathematics. Due to lack of materials, training, large number of students in classroom teachers were not followed all the criteria of internal assessment. Both teachers and students believed that ICT is very useful for the internal assessment but ICT was not properly practiced on community schools of Nepal.