BETWEEN POLICY AND PRACTICE: A QUALITATIVE CASE STUDY OF ASSESSMENT LITERACY IN AN INDONESIAN PRIMARY EFL CLASSROOM UNDER THE MERDEKA CURRICULUM

Abstrak

When Indonesia launched the Merdeka Curriculum in 2022, it asked primary school English teachers to do something genuinely difficult: replace the familiar rhythms of summative testing with ongoing, dialogic, learner-centred assessment  in classes of thirty-five students, with two forty-minute periods per week, and without meaningful professional development support. This study asks what that ask actually looks like from inside a classroom. Drawing on a qualitative single-case study of one experienced primary EFL teacher (Teacher A) in an urban Indonesian elementary school, it investigates how she understands, enacts, and adapts assessment practice under the Merdeka Curriculum. Data were generated through three semi-structured interviews, eight non-participant classroom observations, and systematic document analysis over a six-week period, and analysed using Braun and Clarke's (2022) reflexive thematic analysis framework. Three themes emerged: a structural divergence between Teacher A's formative assessment convictions and the summative logic embedded in school reporting; significant socio-contextual constraints large classes, absent rubric resources, and developmentally complex affective demands that shape her assessment design; and a repertoire of pragmatic adaptive strategies through which she improvises formative intent within systemic limitations. The findings extend existing frameworks of teacher assessment literacy (TAL) by proposing a third dimension assessment improvisation that captures how experienced teachers perform assessment competence under resource constraint. Practically, the study provides granular evidence that the Merdeka Curriculum's formative agenda cannot be realised without structural reform of school-level reporting systems and sustained, context-specific professional development for primary EFL practitioners.