Mark my exercise book!

Description
After five days observation the process teaching and learning of science lessons, it is the time to do an evaluation. The school is having the monthly exam starts from today and as same as me too to evaluate the test items used by the teachers.
Along my observation, almost all the school teachers were did the class revision with the students. So, I took this opportunity to analyse the test items used by teachers to evaluate the students. I had checked the class year 5B students’ exercise book and their experiment report book as a source to evaluate the test items. The students were having two exercise books which are writing exercise book and printed exercise book. The printed exercise book were contenting objective questions and structured questions and also two assessment paper which are mid-year assessment paper and end year assessment paper.

Evaluation
Most of the teachers were did their revision using the printed exercise book that all the students who need to buy in early of the year. From the exercise book, I found that the exercises were according the science subject syllabus and well structure. There was listing the objectives or outcomes that the students will learn after did the exercises. But I noticed that the printed exercise book is the only exercises that they had done during this two months. I was saying that because I found out the teacher was not giving any extra handout or exercise to the students. The writing exercise book was only one or two pages with some vocabulary writing. And also, I found out that the teacher was not giving any experiment to the students. The experiment report book had one experiment but did not do by the students when I asked whether the students really did it or not. Actually, the students were copied the whole experiment from the blackboard.
There was another thing that surprising me was the teacher never mark the both exercise books and the experiment report book from early of the year.

Analysis
From the exercises that I managed to get, I had determined the questions with the level of difficulty based on Bloom’s Taxonomy. In Bloom’s Taxonomy, there were six levels questions arranged in order from lowest to highest which are knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Almost 95% of the questions in the exercise book were in this knowledge level. This level was required the students to name, identify, list, label, match, define, state, etc which was recall of information. The students at this level were learnt the skills of memorizing, remembering, recognizing, and recalling identification. Come to the comprehension level, the students were learnt the skills of interpreting, translating, describing, and organizing. There were required the students to discuss, explain, summarize, conclude, report, etc which was express of facts or ideas. But the exercise questions were much less after achieved the knowledge level. The rest of the questions levels, I can’t determine anymore due to there was no more exercise questions that achieve the rest questions levels. For the application level, students will be learning to problem solving, applying the facts, rules and principles to produce some results. On the analysis level, the skill of separation of a whole into component parts should be learning by the students. Students were required to differentiate, examine, research, debate, etc in this level. Come to synthesis level, the students should be creating a unique, original product that may be in verbal form or may be a physical object. The highest level is evaluation, the students should be exploring to the kind of questions, for example: Do you agree…? What do you think about…? How would you decide about…? which are making value decisions, judgements, and opinions about issues.

Conclusion
All of this questions level should be utilize into the exercise questions to the students by require much more ‘brain power’ and more extensive and elaborate answer. This will increase the effectiveness the test items in evaluating the full potential students in science, not only on the paper and pencil test but also on the hands-on activities.

Action plan
From the conclusion that I had made, I realized that I need to be improve my ability to ask different levels of questions employing suitable reinforcement towards students’ response and always check and mark the exercise book.