The Science Teacher’s Opinions about Using Performance Assessment in Elementary Science Education

Abstract

Since the implementers of curriculum in schools are the teachers, it is imperative that teachers’ opinions are taken into account on new approaches and methods like performance assessment used in science education. Therefore, the views of teachers should be clearly found out. The aim of this research was to determine the views of elementary science teachers towards the use of performance assessment. The research was conducted with 148 science teachers. According to results, however the frequency of using performance assessment during the training is not very high enough, the percentage of teachers who use performance assessment once or twice in an educational year was higher than the percentage of teachers who just use one or not,. The primary reason for teachers to use performance assessment was “transferring learned science subjects in the classroom to its applications in real life,” and “encouraging students to research and collect data.” The most important difficulty they encounter while using performance assessment was “parents’ help.” They thought that parents assist their kids more than teachers expect. They sometimes do the whole assignment on behalf of students. Besides this finding, while evaluating students’ assignments in performance assessment the teachers frequently prefer to use the decisions from their professional experiences and scoring rubrics.