Education World offers a brief summary of findings from a recently released study of assessment reform. Is assessment reform working? How are teachers handling new approaches to assessment? Are students and curriculum benefiting from new assessment methods approaches?

Many performance assessment tools -- essays, research projects, and other open-ended measures, as opposed to multiple-choice assessments -- are not novel. They have been used for years. What is relatively new, however, is the sweeping assessment reform movement. The movement involves the use of performance assessments to bolster state, district, or schoolwide goals. More and more often, performance assessment results are being used to adjust or revamp instruction and curriculum in addition to their traditional uses in assessing student abilities.

A recent study of assessment reform was conducted "to elucidate the nature and effects of the assessment reform movement taking place across the country." The study, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement, had among its major goals

• documenting and analyzing key characteristics of performance assessments;
• documenting and analyzing facilitators and barriers in assessment reform; and
• documenting and assessing the impacts of performance assessment on teaching and learning.

During the spring of 1994 and of 1995, OERI researchers visited 16 schools that were implementing performance assessments. The sample schools included elementary, middle, and high schools in diverse geographical locations. The result of the OERI study were published recently in Studies of Education Reform: Assessment of Student Performance.

THE "CAMEL PROJECT"

The qualitative nature of the study means it includes diverse and interesting examples of performance assessment formats.

One example of such a performance assessment comes from Noakes Elementary School in the Anton School District in Iowa, which decided to join the New Standards Project (NSP) in 1992.

The NSP is jointly run by the National Center on Education and the Economy and the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, and it works toward developing and adopting a set of academic standards and innovative methods to measure student learning.

All teachers at Noakes, a K-6 school, use performance assessments, though in diverse ways. Some teachers use portfolios in all subject areas, others in just one subject.

The "Camel Project" was a fourth-grade English Language Arts task at Noakes that took place during four days in 45-minute class periods.

• Day 1: The teacher gave the students an overview of what the task was about and what students should concentrate on during the task. On this day, the students read "Ships of the Desert," an essay on the history, temperament, and physical characteristics of different types of camels and answered questions about the story.
• Day 2: Students chose a topic (such as "Should our community have a camel in the zoo?") and began writing their essays.
• Day 3: Students talked in small groups about what they had written on the previous day.
• Day 4: Students revised their essays.

OTHER CASE STUDIES

Located near Albany and Schenectady, New York, Hudson High school serves 1,400 9th through 12th graders. For assessment purposes, students in Hudson's Earth Science course were required to "conduct a long-term study that requires understanding of key scientific and geological concepts and that promotes the development of analytical, and investigative skills." Each student was provided with a rock sample. Students were instructed to:

• learn as much as possible about the "pet rock" they received of unknown composition and origin;
• keep a detailed scientific journal of their observations, inferences, and predictions about the pet rock;
• investigate the rock's relationship to the environment; and
• end their investigation with a multimedia, oral presentation summarizing their research.

A very different kind of assessment format is used with students at Ninos Bonitos Elementary School in San Diego, California. In 1994-95, Ninos Bonitos served 924 students in pre-K through 6th grade. Of the children, 39 percent were of Southeast Asian heritage, 46 percent were Hispanic, 5 percent were African American, and the rest were East Asians. Seventy-seven percent of the children were identified as having limited English proficiency.

For a portfolio task, a third/fourth-grade group, made up of "transitional" students who are almost, but not quite, fluent in English, spent a morning working on six computers. After receiving training in the use of educational software, their teacher had designed a performance task that had the students describe and illustrate a book they had read about problems Southeast Asian students experience as they assimilate into their new U.S. culture. As students worked, the teacher coached both writing and computer skills. Students saved their work electronically and in hard copy for their language arts portfolios, which are shared with parents three times a year.

TEACHER AND STUDENT RESPONSES

Evidence about the effects of performance assessments on student learning are mainly anecdotal. Teachers and students talk of student motivation being higher with the change in performance assessments and thus in content. Teachers also say students are improving their writing skills and critical-thinking skills as well as, for example, their presentation skills.

The overall impression from the study is that teachers' find clear rewards for them and for students in performance assessment, but that they also voice concerns about reform methods.

Many teachers say that the overriding benefit of performance assessment is that it gives learning "real life applications" rather than having students work almost in a vacuum.

On the other hand, a number of teachers also voiced concerns that new performance assessment systems require more teacher time to develop assignments and assessments. Perhaps, some teachers indicate, this is a trade-off for more in-depth learning by students. Some teachers also fear a lack of objectivity in the scoring rubrics that are part of the new assessment.

Many students also voiced their appreciation of the "real life applications" of what they were learning and the way they were learning it. Yet some students expressed a kind of confusion at, for example, the new "thematic unit" approach. The students wanted "...more organization of themes -- everything is mixed up in themes; we don't know where we are."

TEACHER APPROPRIATION

If performance assessment is adopted, teachers must use the assessment, adapting it as needed for their classrooms. The degree to which teachers "appropriate" performance assessments for their classrooms is related largely the teacher's degree of involvement in developing and implementing the performance assessment system; the flexibility of the assessment system; and the training they received.

Two findings highlight the problem with judging the quality of the pedagogical changes seen. Teachers are still learning how to use performance assessments in their classes, and so they themselves find it hard to evaluate a relationship between the pedagogical change and students' learning. Furthermore, standards for performance may be unclear, unarticulated, or variable.

The study concludes by recommending further research in these areas:

• how the technical properties and fairness of performance assessment systems can be enhanced;
• the most effective melding of instructional models and assessments to achieve improved student learning;
• longitudinal effects of facilitators and barriers in assessment change;
• how different types of performance assessments are or are not appropriate for assessing the achievements of children with disabilities;
• types of professional development and support activities that best enable teachers to implement different types of performance assessment;
• the impact of performance assessments and related teaching strategies on student learning;
• how opportunity-to-learn factors affect disadvantaged students' performance on different types of performance assessments; and
• the long-term benefits of performance assessments compared with the long-term costs of developing and implementing performance assessments.

For more information about the study, or to learn more about the case studies and assessment projects detailed in the study, you can find its entire text on the U.S. Department of Education's Web site. For additional information about performance assessment, the list of related Internet sites that follows might be helpful.

Related Sites

INTERNET LINKS RELATED TO PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT

• Alternative Assessment: Implications for Social Studies This ERIC Digest summarizes an article about changes to performance assessment and how those changes have affected the learning and teaching of social studies. Emphasized is the close link between the over-arching goal of public education and that of social studies.
• Fairness in Performance Assessment This ERIC Digest maintains that although pedagogical advantages of performance assessment (in buttressing instruction focused on higher order thinking skills) are obvious, research indicates unresolved logistics and psychometric problems, specifically with score generalizability.
• Office of Research Education: Consumer Guide: Performance Assessment The September 1993 Consumer Guide from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement gives a quick overview of performance assessment: what it is, how it works, what research says about it, what it costs, and where to find out more about it.
• Kossor Education Newsletter Billed as a newsletter with "timely, useful information for parents and others who are concerned about public education in America," it presents the possible downside of performance assessment reform.
• Portfolio Assessment This bibliography of portfolio assessment resources is a good starting point for exploring the topic. Several links to Internet sites are provided, and citations from the ERIC database, including how to order ERIC Journal and ERIC Document Citations, are listed.

Article by Sharon Cromwell
Education World®
Copyright © 2006 Education World

04/06/1998