Performance Assessment: Assessing Know-How As Well As Know-What

If a student makes or repairs something—a window frame, a dance, a project report, a CAD drawing, a poem, or a gourmet meal—a teacher should be able to detail the skills that went into doing that work and assess the student on the whole product and performance as well as its component parts. A teacher might also know how much new learning occurred since the previous assessment occurred and how the student acquired that new learning. Such assessments authenticate for the student what she knows and validates for the teacher what the student knows and how she knows what she knows—not only the student’s know-what but know-how and even know-why.

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Our basic premise is that the current assessment system disadvantages many young people who can demonstrate what they know by performing in authentic and challenging contexts. By establishing a system of authentic performance assessments, we hope to provide alternatives to the Carnegie Unit for students to demonstrate competence and gain access to postsecondary learning and high-wage work options that lead to a successful career and lifelong learning.

 

Performance assessment employs a variety of methods for determining whether a student has attained sufficient mastery of essential knowledge, learning, and skills (intellectual, emotional, and social). Performance means just that, a performance, not just being tested on knowing what but also being assessed on knowing how. Typically, performance assessment employs student performances, portfolios, exhibits, and projects that document and demonstrate applications of learning in real-world contexts over-time. Well-constructed performance assessments can be extremely useful for measuring student growth and guiding future learning. Despite their value, few schools use them; even fewer use them well.

Big Picture Learning proposes to produce meaningful performance assessments embedded in and/or directly associated with contextual, real-world integrated units that far surpass the depth of current assessments. These performance assessments will effectively measure depth of student understanding of essential knowledge and skills in a way that promotes student interest and formal connections to the real world. We propose to start our work on performance assessment in two areas: mathematics/quantitative reasoning and science/empirical reasoning. We will align and connect this work with our initiatives in certifications and longitudinal assessment.

Goals and Objectives

Our goal is to develop and disseminate a diverse set of performance assessments and a process for creating them. To successfully develop these products, we will:

1. Develop 2-3 pilot units/modules integrating appropriate content into real-world learning experiences (embedded assessment – initial focus on 9th grade students). These initial pilot units will address quantitative and empirical reasoning and literacy, thereby bringing strengthened academics to what the students find highly relevant.
2. Create benchmark and summative performance assessments to coincide with each unit/module (integration of concepts/skills).
3. Integrate the assessment of William Sedlacek’s non-cognitive variables with other student assessments.
4. Develop a limited number of content-integrated, stand-alone performance assessments that require transfer of concepts/skills embedded in pilot modules/units.
5. Identify and work with a small number of representative pilot/test sites.
6. Team with evaluation experts to gather, analyze, and display student data to efficiently and accurately represent findings as well as improve upon our initial work.

Resources Required

We estimate that this development process will take two years to proceed from prototyping through pilot testing, with an additional year for extensive field-testing in Big Picture Schools and in selected schools from among the various school development organizations participating in the AHSI network.

This work will require a full-time certification development specialist, a full-time performance assessment specialist, and a full-time technical expert (CRESST) serving as a consultant to the project. Additional resources will be required for supporting prototype work, convening a panel of technical experts, travel, and other support costs. We estimate that all three years of work will require about $1.2 million.