19 EEJ 12 (1) (2022) 19-26 English Education Journal http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/eej Factors Affecting the Implementation of Authentic Assessment to Measure Students’ Reading Comprehension: A Case of English Teachers at State Senior High School 1 Purwodadi Fitria Wahyu Nugraheni1, Mursid Saleh2, Rudi Hartono2 1. ASM Santa Maria Semarang, Indonesia 2. Universitas Negeri Semarang, Indonesia Article Info ________________ Article History: Accepted 20 September 2020 Approved 11 January 2020 Published 15 March 2022 ________________ Keywords: Authentic Assessment, Reading Comprehension, Correlation ____________________ Abstract ___________________________________________________________________ The term of assessment refers to the wide variety of methods or tools that educators use to evaluate or measure students’ learning progress, skill, or acquisition. The benefit of assessment for teachers can be used to gather information on planning and modifying teaching and learning programs for students. This study concerns to the factors affecting the implementation of authentic assessment in reading comprehension. This study was aimed at answering four research questions regarding (1) the implementation of authentic assessment to measure students’ reading comprehension, (2) the correlation between teacher’s background and the implementation of authentic assessment, (3) the correlation between teacher’s professional development and the implementation of authentic assessment, and (4) the correlation between teacher’s belief and the implementation of authentic assessment. The researcher applied quantitative correlation research design. The correlation research design was used since it was appropriate to measure the significant correlation between those two variables. The findings revealed that three teachers as the subject of this research had good effort in implementing authentic assessment. They created various assessment to assess students’ reading comprehension. Based on the observation which has scored, their implementation belongs to good, enough, and fair criteria. The next finding is that based on the SPSS computation, among three factors stated previously, the teacher’s belief is significant correlate to the implementation of authentic assessment, meanwhile teacher’s background and teacher’s professional development are not significant correlate. Correspondence Address: Jl. Stonen Selatan III No. 1, Gajahmungkur, Semarang, Indonesia E-mail: fitriawahyunugraheni@gmail.com p-ISSN 2087-0108 e-ISSN 2502-4566 Fitria Wahyu Nugraheni, et al./ English Education Journal 12 (1) (2022) 19-26 20 INTRODUCTION In recent time, a good teacher is needed to make system of education better. In the Act of Teacher and Lecturer explains that a professional teacher is educator who has duties to educate, teach, guide, give direction, train, and assess students. Therefore, teachers can be called as a professional teacher if they have fulfilled all of those qualifications. Meanwhile, Hart & Teeter (2002) propose some aspects that should be mastered by professional teachers. One of those aspects is in terms of having skills to design learning experiences that inspire or interest. Learning experiences refer to any interaction both teachers and students to make classroom situation joyful, interesting, or even comfortable. Teachers have to create various activities in classroom, either in teaching and learning or in assessing students. Thus, it can be said that creating a good assessment to assess students becomes an important thing for teacher. By conducting assessment, teachers can know how far students’ competence and also it can be used as their reflection of their teaching. There are two types of teaching and learning in the classroom, namely teacher-centered and learner-centered. Teacher-centered reflects the teacher’s lesson plan, yet learner-centered reflects learners’ needs and preferences. The education system today should be learner-centered. By giving students authentic assessment, teacher can achieve learner-centered accordingly. This such assessment is also suggested by the ministry of education. Actually, in educational system, the term of assessment refers to the wide variety of methods or tools that educators use to evaluate or measure students’ learning progress, skill, or acquisition. The benefit of assessment for teachers can be used to gather information on planning and modifying teaching and learning programs for students. Meanwhile, for students it can provide information to lead from what has been learned to what needs to be learned next. Currently, Indonesia is implementing 2013 Curriculum. Abdullah (2016: 59) states that 2013 Curriculum is one form of reformative and innovative of education in Indonesia. Meanwhile, Ani (2014) argues that 2013 Curriculum is developed by philosophical foundation which gives basic for the development the whole students’ potential to be qualified Indonesia citizen. The effort in increasing education quality can be achieved through increasing the quality of the learning and assessment system. Further, the learning quality itself can be seen from the assessment result. A good assessment system will encourage teachers to decide appropriate teaching strategy and motivate students to study hard. The term of curriculum refers to a set of education planning which needs to be developed dynamically in accordance to current necessity and changing which happen in society (Faridi, 2008: 13). Therefore, current curriculum which has implemented in education system nowadays is the development from the previous curriculum. The curriculum, learning process, and assessment are three aspects that cannot be separated and relate each other (Made et al., 2015). Further, they add that curriculum can be used as the extension of the education purposes as the foundation of learning program. Meanwhile, learning process is the effort done by teachers to achieve the learning objectives which has proposed in the curriculum. The last, assessment is one of activity used to measure the achievement level of curriculum. Authentic assessment becomes good decision to be implemented in 2013 Curriculum. It has many aspects in assessing students. O’Malley J.M. & Pierce (1996) defines authentic assessment as multiple forms of assessment that reflect student learning, achievement, motivation, and attitudes on instructionally- relevant classroom activities. Meanwhile, Mueller (2005) describes the authentic assessment as a form of assessment in which students are asked to perform real-world tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of essential knowledge and skills. Another derinition proposes by Ningrum (2016) who states that authentic assessment can be used to monitor and measure the capability of students in many kinds of possibilities of solving problems Fitria Wahyu Nugraheni, et al./ English Education Journal 12 (1) (2022) 19-26 21 that they face in real world. Thus, it can be simplified that in teaching and learning process, authentic assessment measures, monitors, and assesses all aspects of students learning result. Authentic assessment process views how students work and learn in the classroom. Likewise, students are involved in interesting, important and beneficial tasks. Students are also required to be active, creative and think critically. Additionally, there are many types of authentic assessment which are commonly used in teaching and learning. Nevertheless, it is possible if the teachers create authentic assessment based on the students’ needs. There are a number of researchers who conducted a research related to authentic assessment. One of them is Retnawati et al. (2016) who conducted a research about teachers’ difficulties in implementing assessment in 2013 Curriculum. This research was conducted to Vocational High School teachers in Yogyakarta Province. Their research aims to describe the difficulties faced by the teachers in implementing the assessment within 2013 Curriculum. The results showed that the teacher had not fully understand the assessment system. The teachers’ difficulties were also found in developing the instrument of attitude, implementing the authentic assessment, formulating the indicators, designing the assessment rubric for the skills, and gathering the scores from multiple measurement techniques. Moreover, the teachers could not find feasible application for describing students’ learning achievements. Other previous study is conducted by Trisanti (2014) related teachers’ perspective on authentic assessment. She used case study in this research, which involved teachers from Central Java and secondary schools English teachers partners of Universitas Negeri Semarang (UNNES). The findings of this research comprise into two perspectives, the positive and negative ones which mean the teachers’ ability in designing it and their difficulties in facing it. Further, the researcher also gives suggestion that teachers need to be given opportunity to be creative and innovative in designing the authentic assessment tasks in their teaching. Meanwhile, Aliningsih & Sofwan (2015) also conducted a research related the perceptions and practices of authentic assessment. This research aims at finding the English teachers’ perceptions and practices of authentic assessment in the pilot project schools in Grobogan regency which implement 2013 Curriculum. Fifteen English teachers became the subject of this study. The findings revealed that teachers have positive perceptions towards authentic assessment although they faced several obstacles, for instance insufficient time, large number of students, time consuming, etc. The researchers also stated that there were no significant differences among teachers on the way they applied authentic assessment. They preferred written and task based assessment, performance assessment, and also classroom observation in assessing their students. Moreover, in some cases they did not apply the assessment properly as they did not put the assessment principles into practices. The previous studies have discussed the implementation of authentic assessment, even so the research related factors affecting the implementation of authentic assessment has never been discussed. Therefore, this research concerns to the factors affecting the implementation of authentic assessment in reading comprehension. How the teachers implement authentic assessment is obviously caused by some factors. In this study, the researcher limits the factors into teacher’s background, professional development, and personal beliefs. This research is needed to be done since by correlating those factors above and the implementation of authentic assessment, it can be used to figure out whether there is a correlation between those factors and the implementation of authentic assessment. This research focused on reading comprehension since it is one of four skills which takes important part in language learning. Thus, as stated by Munir & Hartono (2016) that it is not an exaggeration to say that reading plays a pivotal role of English learners in this era. Students can be good in writing if they have good comprehension in reading first. Nunan (2003) points out that reading is a process of readers Fitria Wahyu Nugraheni, et al./ English Education Journal 12 (1) (2022) 19-26 22 combining information from a text and their own background knowledge to build meaning. In reading, there must be a process which is called comprehending. Meanwhile, Rosari et al., (2016) state that comprehension refers to the ability to go beyond the words, to understand the ideas and the relationships between ideas conveyed in a text. They add that in dealing with reading comprehension, students must be able to understand the words, sentences, and the whole text relating to the context to get the gist of the text. Thus, it can be concluded that reading comprehension is the process of making meaning from text which has the goal to gain overall understanding of the readers. Furthermore, by having good reading comprehension students are able to read text and understand its meaning. English learners are also tend to get greater progress in other areas of language. METHOD The subject of this research is three English teachers at SMA N 1 Purwodadi. The researcher used observation and questionnaire as the instruments for collecting the data. Firstly, the researcher conducted the observation of three authentic assessments for each teacher. Therefore, it was nine classroom observations for all teachers. The researcher used observation sheets to measure how well the teachers implemented authentic assessment. Later, the observation sheets would be calculated to achieve the score for each teacher. Secondly, the researcher distributed questionnaire to gain more data of the factors affecting the implementation of authentic assessment. After calculating the questionnaire result, the researcher employed SPSS computation. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS The Implementation of Authentic Assessment to Measure Students’ Reading Comprehension There were three English teachers as the subject of this research. Each teacher implemented various authentic assessment to measure students’ reading comprehension. In case 1 which refers to teacher 1 (henceforth T1), she implemented text with comprehension questions, presentation, and reader response assessments. She prepared her lesson plan well, further she also created holistic rubrics for presentation and reader response assessments. She always gave feedback to students’ assessment. The total score for T1 is 77, in which it belongs to good criteria. In case 2 which refers to teacher 2 (henceforth T2), she implemented text with comprehension questions, retellings, and cloze tests in assessing students’ reading comprehension. Actually, cloze tests was not really authentic since in this assessment students just chose the appropriate answer which has provided in the box. Thus, they were not demanded to have deeper knowledge of the text. Whereas, the assessment can be said authentic if it fulfilled the criteria such as performing a task, real-life, construction/application, students- structured, and direct evidence. Meanwhile, cloze tests was like multiple choice assessment. Students were asked to select a response without demonstrate their understanding. Additionally, T2 created holistic rubric to assess students’ retellings, but unfortunately she did not apply it. She never gave feedback to students because she believed that students in Senior High School level were adult and they realized that they got mistakes so they can be better in the future. The total score for T2 is 63, in which it belongs to enough criteria. In case 3 which refers to teacher 3 (henceforth T3), she implemented retellings, text with comprehension questions, and reader response. She was a type of teacher who very often encourage her students. She prepared her lesson plans and teaching aids perfectly. Unfortunately, she just created one rubric for retellings assessment. Actually, the use of rubric in authentic assessment is still being big problems for teachers. As stated in the previous study conducted by Retnawati, et. al (2016) who stated that one of teachers’ difficulties in implementing authentic assessment is found in designing the assessment rubric for the skills. In reality, not all teachers can develop the assessment rubric Fitria Wahyu Nugraheni, et al./ English Education Journal 12 (1) (2022) 19-26 23 perfectly. It also supported by the research conducted by Saputri (2016) who stated that scoring still to be one of main difficulties in implementation 2013 Curriculum. That problem still occurs nowadays. Actually, teachers need some instructions to solve that problem. Besides, she always gave authentic examples to students related to the lesson. Also, in giving assessment to measure students’ reading comprehension, she gave authentic assessments which reflects students’ knowledge and skill. Sometimes she gave feedback to students, but sometimes she forgot. But, in the end of the lesson she always gave reinforcement to students and guided them to make summary. The total score for T3 is 69 which belongs to fair criteria. Teacher’s Background Affects the Implementation of Authentic Assessment to Measure Students’ Reading Comprehension Table 1. The Result of SPSS Computation of Factors Affecting the Implementation of Authentic Asessment rq1 rq4 rq2 rq3 rq1 Pearson Correlation 1 .999* -.981 .963 Sig. (2-tailed) .021 .126 .173 N 3 3 3 3 rq4 Pearson Correlation .999* 1 -.974 .954 Sig. (2-tailed) .021 .146 .194 N 3 3 3 3 rq2 Pearson Correlation -.981 -.974 1 -.997* Sig. (2-tailed) .126 .146 .048 N 3 3 3 3 rq3 Pearson Correlation .963 .954 -.997* 1 Sig. (2-tailed) .173 .194 .048 N 3 3 3 3 *. Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). Fitria Wahyu Nugraheni, et al./ English Education Journal 12 (1) (2022) 19-26 24 Note rq 1 : First research question of this study. rq 2 : Second research question of this study. It refers to the implementation of authentic assessment and the teacher’s background. rq 3 : Third research question of this study. It refers to the implementation of authentic assessment and the teacher’s professional development. rq 4 : Fourth research question of this study. It refers to the implementation of authentic assessment and the teacher’s beliefs. The table above shows the result of SPSS computation of factors affects the implementation of Authentic Assessment. The first factor is the teacher’s background. The researcher calculated using SPSS whether there is significant correlation between the implementation of authentic assessment and the teacher’s background. The result is 0.12 which means that it is more than the significant value which has been mentioned before. It can be said that there is no significant correlation. In this research, the teacher’s background was measured by using questionnaire. The questionnaire consisted of five items. Mostly, the questionnaire asked about the length of teaching and education background of the teacher. Teacher 2 (T2) got the highest score in teacher’s background, but in implementing authentic assessment she got some difficulties. In contrast, teacher 1 (T1) got less score among other teachers but in implementing authentic assessment, she got the highest score. Therefore, teacher’s background did not necessary judge the quality of the teacher. Additionally, it can be concluded that there is no significant correlation between the implementation of authentic assessment and the teacher’s background. Teacher’s Professional Development Affects the Implementation of Authentic Assessment to Measure Students’ Reading Comprehension The second factor is professional development which can be also measured by using questionnaire. The questionnaire in this part was divided into two categories. The total item was fifteen. First category discussed about how is the impact of workshops, conferences, teacher association (MGMP), and Classroom Action Research. The researcher provided three possible answers, namely low impact, moderate impact, and high impact. Meanwhile, the second category discussed about their effort in developing their knowledge, such as reading educational literature, journal, or teaching practices. In this part the researcher provided three possible answers, namely low level of need, moderate level of need, or high level of need. Based on the questionnaire calculation, teacher 1 (T1) got the highest score in professional development. Nevertheless, SPSS calculation in table 1 shows that there is no significant correlation between the implementation of authentic assessment and the professional development. The result was 0.71, which means it is more than 0.05 as the significant value. Therefore, it can be concluded that there is no significant correlation between the implementation of authentic assessment and the professional development. In this research, even though the teacher was enthusiastic in seminar, conference, even classroom action research, it did not necessary judge the quality of the teacher. Teacher’s Personal Belief Affects the Implementation of Authentic Assessment to Measure Students’ Reading Comprehension The last factor is teacher belief. It discussed about their belief in teaching. It can be measured by questionnaire which consisted of eight items. The researcher provided four possible answers, namely strongly disagree, disagree, agree, and strongly agree. The teacher could choose the best answer based on her opinion in teaching and learning process. As written in table 1, SPSS calculation shows the correlation result 0.02 which means it less than 0.05 as the significant value. Thus, it can be said that there is significant correlation between the implementation of authentic assessment and teacher’s belief. The beneficial of authentic assessment can be proven in this study. Regarding to the current curriculum which demands teachers to assess Fitria Wahyu Nugraheni, et al./ English Education Journal 12 (1) (2022) 19-26 25 students using authentic assessment, teacher needs to explore more assessment which is really authentic. They need to be creative and innovative in teaching and learning including giving assessment to students. Further, the awareness in arranging lesson plan and scoring rubric must be improved. Both are important in planning of teaching and learning process till the evaluating. They may relate the planning and real situation in the classroom to achieve the purpose of conducting the assessment. Even though there is no significant correlation between the implementation of authentic assessment and the teacher’s professional development, teachers must still pay attention to their professional development both in following any workshops and reading literature related to the current curriculum. In addition, the government should provide more regular and intensive training of the curriculum and assessment for teachers. CONCLUSION This research was conducted in order to know the implementation of authentic assessment in reading comprehension and the factors affected. Based on the finding, all English teachers have good effort in implementing authentic assessment. They made various types of authentic assessment to measure students’ reading comprehension. From the whole observation, the first teacher (T1) implemented authentic assessment to measure students’ reading comprehension belongs to good criteria. She fulfilled some steps in arranging authentic assessment. She also made rubric and applied it in assessing her students. She gave type of assessments which really authentic, it was proven by the assessments which fulfilled the criteria of authentic assessment. Additionally, she always gave feedback to students’ assessment whether the assessment in oral or written. Meanwhile, the second teacher (T2) implemented authentic assessment to measure students’ reading comprehension belongs to enough criteria. Based on the observation, T2 fulfilled some steps in conducting authentic assessment. From the three assessments, she just made one rubric although she did not apply it in assessing students’ reading comprehension. Among three assessments which she implemented, one of it is cloze tests in which this type of assessment was not really authentic since it could not measure students’ comprehension in reading. In cloze tests, students only chose the right answer in the provided box, thus it could not be used as the direct evidence towards the students’ knowledge. In term of giving feedback, T2 very seldom gave feedback to her students’ assessment. The last teacher (T3) implemented authentic assessment belongs to fair criteria. She also fulfilled some steps in conducting authentic assessment. Among three assessments, she just created and applied one rubric for retelling. Nevertheless, all the assessments which she was used to measure students’ reading comprehension belongs to authentic. Additionally, T3 did not give feedback regularly. Meanwhile, among three factors; teacher’s background, teacher’s professional development, and teacher’s belief, there is only teacher’s belief which has significant correlation with the implementation of authentic assessment based on the SPSS computation. REFERENCES Abdullah, S. (2016). 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