What is SBA Kit?

Until the mid-nineties the nature of assessment process in Malaysia has been centralised and summative. Realising the shortcomings of relying heavily on centralised summative examinations, the Malaysian government made a move to decentralised assessments through School-based Assessment (SBA). The former Malaysian Minister of Education, Tan Sri Musa Mohamed on May 7, 2003 articulated that “we need a fresh and new philosophy in our approach to exams . . . we want to make the education system less exam-oriented and (we) are looking at increasing SBA as it would be a better gauge of students' abilities.” Hence, SBA was introduced to Year 1 in 2010; and in 2012, SBA was introduced to Form 1 pupils. It is undeniable that with the implementation of SBA the teachers will be playing integral roles as they will be empowered to carry out the assessments at the school level. The SBA Kit is developed to help teachers of the primary and secondary schools improve their professionalism as the capacity to make discretionary judgments in this new assessment system. SBA KIT contains DSK-DSP combo, The Dos & Don’ts of Assessment Format, Text Complexity Modules and Samples of Instruments to promote Higher Order Thinking (HOT).  Exposure will be given on how to produce sample instruments accordingly apart from enabling the teachers to map evidences against the relevant skills and topics. Thus, this workshop aims to expose teachers to the overall use of the SBA Kit and more importantly, it is a platform to share ideas and instructional strategies.