In Singapore, there has been an increasing trend in the use of the English Language as the dominant home language over the last decade. Families use it at home more frequently than they do their mother tongues, resulting in children's decreased interest and ability to speak in their mother tongue.
The teachers at Zhangde Primary School believed that through engaging students in interesting learning and assessment tasks, they would be self-driven in their quest for knowledge and would strive to do well at the subject. In November 2005, the school joined the National Institute of Education's Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice (CRPP) research project on Improving Teachers’ Assessment Literacy in Primary Schools, and piloted its first school-based curriculum for using Alternative Assessments in the Mother Tongue Languages department.
Alternative Assessent documents the school’s journey in using alternative assessment to inform their practice on an ongoing basis. It is designed to offer educators an insight to the rationale and approach used in designing authentic classroom assessment tasks, and contains sample tasks, teachers' reflections, as well as assessment rubrics for readers' reference.
