Reading Literacy of Authentic Assessment to Promote Critical, Argumentative and Higher-Order Thinking Skills in Junior High Schools in Padang

Paradigm shift in the 21st
- century learning system and educational process based
on the 2013 curriculum leads to the changes in the assessment standard in Indonesia.
One of the most essential studies in measuring students' language skills is Reading
Literacy. Reading literacy measures a person's language skills and linguistic
knowledge, critical, argumentative, and higher-order thinking skills in understanding
the contents of reading texts. This research was intended to analyze all reading
questions that used by teacher in Grade IX of Junior High Schools in Padang. This
research is descriptive. It involved observing and describing the behavior of a subject,
also using the written data from students reading literacy questions. The subjects of this
research were five teachers from 2 schools selected. The data collection techniques
were analyzing all documents that contained reading literacy questions given by the
teacher to assess students' ability, transcriptions of all of the interactions that happened
in the class, and to increase the data obtained from document questionnaires were
employed. The research findings found that the typical type of questions teachers ask
during classroom activity is remembering (C1), with 141 questions out of 340
questions. Then, the rarely asked questions are Evaluating (C5) with only 10 questions
of 340 total questions and Creating (C6) with 3 questions of the total questions. So, it
means that 84% of the total questions in the Lower-order Thinking category are found
as the level of questions commonly asked by teachers in reading literacy assessments.