Helping School to Overcome at Risk Students: Some Experiences Imanuel Hitipeuw, Cholis Sadijah, Wiwik Dwi Hastuti State Uniiversity of Malang, Malang, Indonesia Keywords: Educational assessment, At-risk students, Students with special needs Abstract: Educational assessment is important for teachers to know their own students and not only depend on the results solely from other experts. The experiences of the author in dealing with the students diagnosed as having disabilities or special needs --- will be described in order to emphasize the important of the educational assessments as a part of the whole processes in determining the problems of the students in the school. This is a preliminary research about the at risk students. This was a survey research. Observation was used to collect data. There were 4 subjects selected in this preliminary research. The objectives of this paper are to describe some experiences of the author about at-risk students in elementary level, and also to give some lessons learned from the schools. 1 INTRODUCTION Students right now are called as the digital generation and they exhibit different behaviours. When they still young, they are surrounded by many things but through gadgets. They can play football or tennis, but not real physical football or tennis but through video game. When they communicate and have many friends, it does not mean that they have met them face to face. So, they may be lack in social interaction manner because they mostly work through gadget and communicate through gadget. This situation shows that teachers must improve their skills when facing different generations (Clarke, 2012; Singer Trakhman, Alexander and Silverman, 2018) Students are individuals that come from different background. They deserved to be equally treated. Many statements supported the equality, but in the level of implementation in schools, some teachers may not know how to do that. And this is not about they do not want to do. They may be fluent talk about that matter but they may be lack what we call the procedural knowledge (Eggen and Kauchak, 2010) that focus on how to do the right things for the students. So how to help this teachers to make them capable help their own students --- is an important step. If individual differences are not considered in planning and implementing teaching and learning, students in the classroom may feel uneasy to stay in. And if these students keep getting difficulties in catching up with the classroom rules or activities, then they will show problems. And in the end they may not feel safe to be in the classroom. The condition of the classroom will be perceived negative and this may affect the learning and the behaviour of the students. Students who do not know how to do with the academic activities will try to do something else. Because Human being is an active organism, if they cannot learn, then they will do other things called off-task behaviour (Green et al., 2012; Cooper, Heron and Heward, 2013; Steel and Klingsieck, 2016). Students with off-task behaviours, actually need help, but for some teachers, they may be perceived as trouble makers. Moreover, the students might be perceived as rebellion against authority, and this in turn, make certain teachers punished those students. This punishment does not solve the problem but creating more negative climate about the classroom and the students may develop aggressive behaviours (Alberto and Troutman, 2012; Cooper, Heron and Heward, 2013). In the condition where the students felt the classroom not safe anymore, they may get difficulties to develop themselves. And if they stay at the school, they may end up with the label as Students with Special Needs. With the label, some teachers might perceive the problems of the students were not theirs anymore, but special education teachers. This condition leaves the children untreated and put them in risk condition. And this condition make them become at-risk children (Lee et al., 2015; Marbouti, Diefes-Dux and Madhavan, 2016; Chaves-Sousa et al., 2017). 246 Hitipeuw, I., Sadijah, C. and Hastuti, W. Helping School to Overcome at Risk Students: Some Experiences. DOI: 10.5220/0008410602460250 In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Learning Innovation (ICLI 2018), pages 246-250 ISBN: 978-989-758-391-9 Copyright c  2019 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved