Author(s): Kamara, S. S., & Dadhabai, S. D.
Education stands as bridge that leads people out of poverty into prosperity. In order to evaluate the improvement as well as individual students’ performance, the student assessment must be performed in a very technical manner, which proposes additional actions for advancement of teaching, learning and distribute information by appropriate participants. The study in particular endeavored to determine the assessment factor influencing students’ academic achievement in relation to summative assessment, formative assessment and assessment strategies from lecturers, predominantly adopted for assessment in higher education. Thereby, a study was conducted at Freetown Polytechnic College in Sierra Leone, in which simple random sampling technique was used (so that every lecturer has an equal opportunity of been selected) to select sample size of 150 lecturers from 437 lecturers in the college for the research. The researcher summarizes related literature reviews of both national and international investigations for secondary data and structured questionnaire was utilized for primary data collection. Two research objectives were raised with three hypotheses, for objective one, reliability statistics, descriptive statistics and multiple regression analysis were used to test hypothesis at 0.05 level of significant. While objective two was analyzed using frequency table with percentage. Furthermore, the study explained various connections between quality and effectiveness in education, discloses the frame work of student accomplishment at school. Findings revealed that, summative assessment is the most important assessment that can influence students’ academic achievement, followed by formative assessment while assessment strategies from lecturers influenced students negatively. It was suggested that more emphasis must be placed on assessment, seating accommodation and semester syllabus coverage by lecturers. It was concluded that summative assessment is the main assessment that can be apply to determine students’ academic achievement. The study un-factored the utilization of accumulated student evaluation outcomes towards achieving judgments in regard to teacher, students and schools performance along with education organizations.