The disadvantages of portfolio-based assessment

the usefulness of involving students in the process of their own assessment as well as providing feedback in instruction . Also, another finding done by Calfee and Perfumo 1993 stressed that the use of portfolio-based assessment is important for the teacher to show the learners’ ability and competence, rather than only choosing the correct answers that the learners usually do when they are doing test and especially portfolio assessment provides more information about the learners, rather than just doing mechanical grading. Moreover, it follows that portfolio adjusts the students to produce various types of more authentic works and insist them to be more creative. Besides, portfolio assessment gives the learners more freedom and helps them develop and improve higher order thinking skills and meta-cognitive strategies. It follows that the portfolio assessment in language teaching is a device used to assess various language samples that the learner compiles”. Shohamy and Walton 1992: p.14. One study about the students’ perceptions toward the implementation of portfolio- based assessment by Mustafa 2010, finds other results. The results of the survey confirm that the participants of this study generally have positive attitudes towards portfolio assessment. For instance, in terms of understanding the portfolio process, more than half of the subjects 56.4 state that they know how and why to compile a portfolio in their courses. Additionally, 40.8 of the subjects assert that portfolio sharing activities were beneficial to their understanding of portfolio preparation process. Such activities contribute to their understanding of portfolio preparation process, whereas, 23.5 of them state that such activities do not contribute to their understanding of portfolio preparation process. In terms of students’ beliefs on and reactions to actual practice in preparing portfolio, only 38.9 of them find portfolio’s actual practice as an unsuccessful teaching and evaluation procedure. The writer hoped that by finishing this study, the result of this study could be used as a consideration for the teacherslecturers before they come to decide what assessment they 8 will apply or implement in the teaching and learning. Besides, it is also hoped that it could be used by the learners as a guidance when they will do the portfolio. THE STUDY A. Context of the Study The setting of the study took place in a Private University which is located in Salatiga, Central Java, Indonesia. One of its faculties in this university, English Department, had adopted and implemented portfolio-based assessment to one of its courses and of which is Academic Reading course. The subject of this small study was the Faculty of Language and Literature FLL students who had taken Academic Reading course. The Academic Reading course was a three-hour reading course where the portfolio became the main assessment instrument in this course. The reason of choosing this faculty was its high standing in the region as an English language faculty with an excellent reputation and the high quality of the students itself.

B. Participants

The subjects of the research were 100 intermediate level students from any “angkatan” who were selected to be given questionnaires in response to some questions provided. Since the gender was not a variable in this study, the subjects were not grouped in terms of gender. However, the equal numbers of students from both genders were selected. The participants chosen were the Faculty of Language and Literature FLL students from any “angkatan” who had taken Academic reading course. Those who had successfully passed or failed this course will be given questionnaires purposively since the study hoped to find out the students’ perceptions toward portfolio-based assessment. 9

C. Instruments

In this study the questionnaires was used as the main instrument to collect the main data regarding to the students’ perception toward the use of portfolio-based assessment in the Academic Reading course. As in the study by Yang as cited in Mustafa C. 2010 the present study used a portfolio use attitude questionnaire. The questionnaire was close-ended questionnaires which included 22 statements that students rated on a five-point scale from strongly disagree 1 up to strongly agree 5. The items in the questionnaire investigated students’ attitudes related to the use of portfolio in three areas; participants’ awareness about the portfolio 7 items, participants’ attitudes toward the real practice of portfolio 5 items, and participants’ attitudes toward the advantages and disadvantages of portfolios 10 items. The questionnaire is shown in the APPENDIX. D. Data Collection Procedure In this study, the data were gathered through a portfolio attitude questionnaire, some close-ended questions accompanied by the portfolio attitude questionnaire for the participants. After having a written permission from the school administration, the questionnaires were given to all of the 100 subjects in the same college. The participants were taken from 4 different classes whom the participants had already taken academic reading and done portfolio in that course. The time given will be approximately 15-20 minutes for the participants. The subjects were given the questionnaire forms by the researcher.

E. Data Analysis

In the data analysis procedure, in order to answer the research question, the frequencies of each statement were calculated and analyzed manually by counting for each category. Regarding to find out the result, students’ responses to the open ended questions 10