POLICY GUIDELINES ON CLASSROOM ASSESSMENT FOR THE K TO 12 BASIC EDUCATION
PROGRAM (BEP)
Classroom Assessment is a joint process that involves both teachers and learners. It is an
integral part of teaching and learning. Teachers provide appropriate assessment when they aim
to holistically measure learners’ current and developing abilities while enabling them to take
responsibility in the process. This view recognizes the diversity of learners inside the classroom,
the need for multiple ways of measuring their varying abilities and learning potentials, and the
role of learners as co-participants in the assessment process.
At the heart of this assessment framework is the recognition and deliberate consideration of the
learners’ zone of proximal development (Vygotsky 1978). Appropriate assessment is committed
to ensure learners’ success in moving from guided to independent display of knowledge,
understanding, and skills and to enable them to transfer this successfully in future situations.
From this point of view, assessment facilitates the development of learners’ higher-order
thinking and 21st-century skills.
This view of assessment, therefore, acknowledges the unity of instruction and assessment.
Assessment is part of day-to-day lessons and extends the day-to-day classroom activities that
are already in place in the K to 12 curriculum
What is assessed in the classroom?
Assessment in the classroom is aimed at helping students perform well in relation to the
learning standards. Learning standards comprise content standards, performance standards
and learning competencies that are outlined in the curriculum.
1. Content Standards identify and set the essential knowledge and understanding that
should be learned. They cover a specified scope of sequential topics within each
learning strand, domain, theme, or component. Content standards answer the question,
“What should the learners know?”
Performance Standards describe the abilities and skills that learners are expected to
demonstrate in relation to the content standards and integration of 21st century skills.
The integration of knowledge, understanding, and skills is expressed through creation,
innovation and adding value to products/ performance during independent work or in
collaboration with others. Performance standards answer the following questions:
“What can learners do with what they know?”
“How well must learners do their work?”
“How well do learners use their learning or understanding in different situations?”
“How do learners apply their learning or understanding in real-life contexts”?
“What tools and measures should learners use to demonstrate what they know?”
Learning Competencies refer to the knowledge, understanding, skills, and attitudes that
students need to demonstrate in every lesson and/or learning activity.
Concept Development. The learning standards in the curriculum reflect progressions
of concept development The Cognitive Process Dimensions adapted from Anderson &
Krathwohl (2001) may be a good way to operationalize these progressions. It provides a
scheme for classifying educational goals, objectives, and standards. It also defines a
broad range of cognitive processes from basic to complex, as follows:
Remembering – The learner can recall information and retrieve relevant knowledge
from long-term memory: identify, retrieve, recognize, duplicate, list, memorize, repeat,
reproduce
Understanding – The learner can construct meaning from oral, written, and graphic
messages: interpret, exemplify, classify, summarize, infer, compare, explain,
paraphrase, discuss
Applying – The learner can use information to undertake a procedure in familiar
situations or in a new way: execute, implement, demonstrate, dramatize, interpret,
solve, use, illustrate, convert, discover
Analyzing – The learner can distinguish between parts and determine how they relate
to one another, and to the overall structure and purpose: differentiate, distinguish,
compare, contrast, organize, outline, attribute, deconstruct
Evaluating – The learner can make judgments and justify decisions: coordinate,
measure, detect, defend, judge, argue, debate, critique, appraise, evaluate
Creating – The learner can put elements together to form a functional hole, create a
new product or point of view: generate, hypothesize, plan, design, develop, produce,
construct, formulate, assemble, design, devise
