DESCRIPTIVE ASSESSMENT FROM CLASS IV TO CLASS VI UNDER PANDEMIC CONDITIONS

Abstract

The time of the pandemic subjected the world education system to a life-threatening challenge, an
experience that the Republic of North Macedonia could not avoid. The prevention of COVID-19 dictated the
temporary closure of educational institutions at all levels. The pandemic imposed a reorganization of the education
system in general since in addition to the system, it also encountered all the subjects who were not prepared and had
no prior experience with distance learning, which made the end of the relevant school year to be left at the mercy of
the individual circumstances of the teachers. However, the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year revealed facts
about the system in different approaches and preparation for a new beginning. Since the majority of teachers
declared a lack of skill in manipulating technology equipment, all teachers were trained in the use of educational
platforms specially prepared for distance learning. The platform offered at the national level proved to be accessible
for manipulation by any teacher regardless of the level of prior knowledge of the teachers. Although with a lot of
skepticism, after adopting the primary manipulation of the platform, the teachers shared their concern about the
objective and realistic assessment of the student’s achievements, the forms, methods, and measurements that had to
be realized during distance learning as well.
Descriptive assessment should be suggestive, provide feedback, be comprehensible and clear, simple, transparent,
short, stimulate curiosity, continuous and economical. The same should include all formal and informal means, and
all methods of marking or evaluation should be used to expand official information between the relevant factors
teachers, students, and parents, with which the differences in the effect of the implementation of the same are
examined. The descriptive assessment with its characteristics provides relevant data for creating a descriptive
summative grade. It is in this paper that the level of realization of descriptive assessment in times of pandemic will
be elaborated as a form of assessment and its basic characteristics as a process, as well as the way of implementation
in practice. This research also aims to investigate the attitudes of teachers regarding descriptive assessment during
distance learning. The real examination of the problem will be elaborated by answering the questions that are
oriented to give an overview of the following issues: the attitudes and experience of teachers regarding the
assessment of student achievements during distance learning, the formation of portfolios from the teacher as a tool
to help and prove the achievements of the students for distance assessment, as well as the eventual difficulties during
the assessment and the opinions of the teachers about the feedback information of the assessments they have
applied. The collected results will be presented through statistical methods to give a clear and real overview of the
real experience of the process of descriptive assessment of student achievement during distance learning.