Performance Assessment in Education: A Comprehensive Overview

Performance assessment in education is an evolving field with varied definitions and applications. It represents a shift from traditional, standardized testing towards more authentic and comprehensive methods of evaluating student learning. This article explores the definition, components, benefits, and implementation of performance assessments in education.

Defining Performance Assessment

Performance assessment measures how well students apply their knowledge, skills, and abilities to authentic problems. The key feature is that it requires the student to produce something, such as a report, experiment, or performance, which is scored against specific criteria. This contrasts with traditional multiple-choice tests, where students select answers from predetermined options. The definition of performance-based assessments varies greatly depending on author, disciple, publication, and intended audience. In general, a performance-based assessment measures students' ability to apply the skills and knowledge learned from a unit or units of study.

Authentic Learning

Experts emphasize the “authentic” nature of performance assessment and project-based learning, although “authentic” doesn’t always mean lifelike. A good performance assessment can use simulations, as long as they are faithful to real-world situations. For example, in science class, technology can simulate plant growth or land erosion, processes that take too long for a hands-on experiment.

Key Components of Performance Assessment

While performance-based assessments vary, the majority of them share key characteristics. First and foremost, the assessment accurately measures one or more specific course standards. Additionally, it is:

Complex: Multi-step assignments measure how well a student transfers and applies knowledge and complex skills.
Authentic: Performance Based Assessments allow all students to demonstrate what they know and can do through real-world application, preparing graduates for college, career, and beyond.
Process/product-oriented: In undertaking the task students perform or produce something that demonstrates that they have mastered specific skills and competencies.
Open-ended: Normally, students are presented with an open-ended question that may produce several different correct answers.
Time-bound: In the higher-level tasks, there is a sense of urgency for the product to be developed or the process to be determined, as in most real-world situations.

Performance Tasks

A performance assessment typically consists of several performance tasks. A performance task is a piece of work students are asked to do to show how well they apply their knowledge, skills, or abilities-from writing an essay to diagnosing and fixing a broken circuit. Performance tasks also may be included in traditional multiple-choice tests.

Read also: Your Guide to Nursing Internships

Rubrics

A list of criteria by which performance assessments will be judged, which describes different levels of quality for each criterion. Rubrics and feedback modules are designed to give students information about the substance and quality of the work and for avenues of improvement.

Portfolios

This assessment consists of a body of student work collected over an extended period, from a few weeks to a year or more. This work can be produced in response to a test prompt or assignment but is often simply drawn from everyday classroom tasks. Frequently, portfolios also contain an element of student reflection.

Exhibitions

A type of performance assessment that requires a public presentation, as in the sciences or performing arts. Other fields can also require an exhibition component. Students might be required, for instance, to justify their position in an oral presentation or debate.

Examples of Performance Assessments

Assessment tasks may involve:

Producing a product
Performing an activity
Reporting on an investigation

Students demonstrate understanding and apply knowledge by:

Explaining processes and methodologies
Solving problems
Explaining phenomena
Forming hypotheses
Answering questions
Conducting inquiries
Creating original work

Some specific examples include:

Solving a non-routine math problem and explaining and defending the methodology
Designing and conducting an experiment to address a real-world hypothesis
Investigating, researching and answering a debatable historical question
Creating a podcast about an issue affecting the school
Conducting a trial of a literary character
Talking about a novel with an adult
Engaging in a conversation in a foreign language
Producing an original work of art and having it critiqued
Interviewing members of a community about a public health issue
Designing and building a costume for a school musical

Benefits of Performance Assessment

Performance Based Assessments allow students to explain their thinking, evaluate ideas, investigate and research their own questions, and truly demonstrate learning. There are several benefits of using performance assessments in education:

Deeper Learning: Teachers and students reported that the performance assessment initiatives provided students with an opportunity to demonstrate deeper learning competencies, including engaging in critical thinking and “learning how to learn” by reflecting on their experiences and growth.
Real-World Application: Performance Based Assessments allow all students to demonstrate what they know and can do through real-world application, preparing graduates for college, career, and beyond.
Development of Essential Skills: Research, inquiry, and writing skills played a key role in the performance assessment process in all three districts, as did metacognition (i.e., self-reflection). This process also helped students build their public speaking confidence and develop their ability to ask and answer questions.
College and Career Readiness: Multi-step assignments measure how well a student transfers and applies knowledge and complex skills. Students demonstrate proficiency in ways that will be expected of them later in college, career, and life.
Accurate Reflection of School Quality: Performance Based Assessments Grow out of curriculum, Professionalize teaching and Accurately reflect school quality and culture
Transparency and Accountability: Teacher-generated, curriculum-embedded performance assessments create a richer means of assessing student achievement and serve as the primary student learning measure. When examples and demonstrations of student work are made public and presented to the community they provide genuine accountability to major stakeholders. The accountability is more genuine than standardized testing as the work is an authentic reflection of the actual schooling and not a mere proxy for class and, all too often, race.
Valid and Reliable Evaluations: Provided that exhibitions and demonstrations are available for community and public inspection, assessments are judged according to clearly defined task appropriate standards and rubric, and tasks are aligned to learning goals and standards, Performance Based Assessments are valid and reliable evaluations of student learning.

Implementing Performance Assessment

Teachers learn to design, validate, and implement high-quality performance assessments and reliably score resulting student work through professional learning. Like in the real world, students have the opportunity to practice and revise their work - subject to feedback and collaborative processes - before final performance or submission. Performance assessments in the classroom that are integrated into students’ daily work, drive quality instruction, and assess student growth over time.

Designing Performance-Based Assessments

Most recently, working with a high school math teacher to create a performance-based assessment for a unit on probability is a simplified version of planning, loosely based on the backward design process:

Identify goals of the performance-based assessment. In this instance, the teacher wanted to challenge her students to use critical thinking and problem-solving skills. She also wanted them to exhibit less codependence and more individuality while completing this assessment. The teacher did not want students to rely on her direction about how to complete each step of the assessment.
Select the appropriate course standards. Once the goals were identified, she selected the Common Core standards to be addressed with this performance assessment. She decided that the assessment should measure students' understanding of conditional probability and rules of probability.
Review assessments and identify learning gaps. This was a very important step. Looked at the current worksheets that students were completing for the unit. Two-way frequency tables were a large part of the assignments. Next, looked at what was missing and noted that there was very little relevant real-world application. As a result, decided to create a performance-based assessment that was also reality-based. Moreover, this task would require students to analyze two-way frequency tables along with other charts and graphs.
Design the scenario. After brainstorming a few different scenarios, settled on a situation where the students would decide if an inmate should be granted parole or remain in prison. This scenario included five key components: Setting, Role, Audience, Time frame, Product
Gather or create materials. Depending on the scenario, this step may or may not be needed. For this particular assessment, wanted students to calculate the probability of the inmate returning to prison. For their review, created seven different documents that included pie charts, bar graphs, and two-way frequency tables. All of the information was based on statistics from government agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Prisons and Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Develop a learning plan. Wanted to be careful not to "teach to the test" in preparing students for the performance-based assessment. Needed to strike a balance between teaching the content (e.g., probability given two independent events) and preparing students for the task (e.g., interpreting the validity of a media resource). Brainstormed six different formative assessments that would need to be in place before students completed the performance task. However, also acknowledged that this part of our plan would need to be constantly reviewed and revised depending on student learning needs.

Conditions for Successful Implementation

Three key starting conditions were important when introducing performance assessments within the districts: (1) technical assistance, (2) opportunities to observe performance assessments in action, and (3) a strategy to develop and scale performance assessments. Technical assistance, including professional learning supports, played an important role in all three districts. For example, each district worked closely with technical assistance providers to develop trainings, shared rubrics, and related resources.

The Role of Policy and Practice

At both the state and local levels, a supportive policy and practice environment played an important role. This included the focus on deeper learning competencies in the Common Core State Standards and the Smarter Balanced Assessments and the shift away from past high-stakes assessments with the suspension of the California High School Exit Exam. It also included efforts to align education with the changing nature of the workforce and society through the funding of career and technical education initiatives, such as California Pathway Academies and the California Career Pathways Trust, as well as Linked Learning pilots at the state and local levels.

Performance Assessment vs. Standardized Testing

Dependence on standardized testing in K-12 education to assess student knowledge and skills is outdated for the complex higher order tasks of the modern world. They are not “authentic” measurements of progress - they are divorced from the daily inquiry-based processes and student-teacher and peer interactions of the daily classroom. Because of their inherent limitations, biases, time constraints, and stakes, they are harmful to our most vulnerable students. Students’ futures should not be based on simply a 1-3 day test; rather, assessing students and their futures should be based on a more holistic approach to more accurately reflect students’ abilities.

Standardized tests negatively impact teaching and learning by limiting and channeling the learning process to a single commercially produced instrument. They narrow curriculum as “teaching to the test” becomes the standard practice; they devalue teacher professionalism by calling into question the capacity of those with daily engagement with students to evaluate student capacity and progress; and they in the aggregate they warp public perception of school quality by reducing school evaluation to a few test score data points. On the whole, standardized tests are a mediocre and misleading way to capture student performance or teacher effectiveness.

Limitations of Standardized Testing

Narrows the curriculum
Devalues teachers
Misinforms the public about school quality

tags: #performance #assessment #in #education #definition