Teachers Practice of School-Based Assessment (SBA) Techniques in Science Classes

The major thrust of this paper was to examine the practices of School-based assessment (SBA) techniques in science classes in senior secondary school in Benue State. The study adopted a descriptive survey research design. The population for the study was all the 287 science teachers in all the public senior secondary schools in Education Zone C of Benue State. Three research questions and three null hypotheses guided the study. The sample was 150 science teachers consisting of 69 male and 81 female. Stratified random sampling technique was adopted to select 150 teachers spread over the three science subjects (biology, chemistry and physics). Questionnaire on School-Based Assessment Practices (SBAP) containing 52 items which was developed by the researchers was used for data collection. The instrument was face validated by three experts from Science Education Department, University of Nigeria Nsukka. The reliability of the instrument was determined using Cronbach Alpha; this yields an internal consistency coefficient of 0.87. Copies of the instruments were retrieved and analyzed using mean and standard deviation to answer the research questions while analysis of variance (ANOVA) was adopted in testing the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. It was observed that the practices of School-based assessment (SBA) techniques is very low, the teachers are of the opinion that School-based assessment (SBA) practices slows down teaching, difficult to implement, has an unknown scope and time consuming. It was also discovered that the teachers are not totally clear about the fundamentals of School-based assessment (SBA) practices. It recommended that School-based assessment (SBA) techniques be used extensively and exclusively to provide information about students achievement