Benchmark Assessment

Benchmarking is the practice of identifying, understanding, and adopting the successful business practices and processes used by other companies to increase success. In terms of curriculum studies, benchmark assessment is the means of assessing student knowledge for the purpose of being accountable or competitive, resulting in curriculum decisions being based on what other schools and school districts do for their students in another place and time rather than on the needs of one's current students.

Linked to the concept of mastery, this practice has its roots in the Middle Ages where the guild required a masterpiece for admission into a trade. The later roots of this current educational practice came from the Xerox Corporation where it was developed to improve the company's performance in the face of increasing international competition. It is this factor that is probably most closely tied to the efforts to make the curriculum more relevant to a global market and to make schools, teachers, and students more accountable and more competitive.

Although it does involve learning from one's competitor, benchmark assessment is more focused and narrowly defined for educational purposes. In terms of the teaching and learning process, assessment refers to activities used by teachers to evaluate students' work. Thus, benchmark assessments serve as indicators of the students' overall performance and knowledge base for the entire school year as well as their likely performance on accountability assessments. With benchmark assessments, teachers and administrators are supposed to be able to identify those students in need of additional instruction or instructional intervention.

In a move toward increasing global competitiveness as measured by standardized test scores, the [Page 76]U.S. federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) signed into law in late 2001 aimed for a uniformity of goals, curriculum, teaching methods, and assessments. At the center of NCLB is the use of standardized tests to document the achievement of students and schools. The basic premise is that this uniformity offers the most straightforward means of addressing the inequities that exist among classrooms and schools by providing equality of curriculum and instruction that are measured by the benchmark assessments. To improve student learning across the country, all students must receive the same education and be held to the same high standards on standardized tests.

Tied to the use of content standards that set the directions for the curriculum content, benchmark assessment is being used as the means to satisfy the need for public accountability that currently requires that skills and knowledge be tested and results made public. Benchmarks specify what the students should know and be able to do as a result of instruction and are easily converted into test itemshence benchmark assessment. Thus, these benchmarks can set the conditions for a test-driven curriculum, particularly in a high-stakes context, such as NCLB.

Large scale testing as mandated by this federal law can result in several unintended consequences for students, teachers, and school systems. Many school administrators view centralized curriculum and prescribed instructional programs as the most direct way to increase student test scores, even though these types of assessments narrow the curriculum by emphasizing basic skills and not higher order thinking skills. These assessments also tend to detract from authentic teaching and learning, and student motivation for learning can be negatively impacted resulting in a higher dropout rate when high stakes such as graduation are tied to the test results of benchmark assessments. Benchmark assessments also narrow the professional discretionary space of teachers in making professional decisions about what to teach and how long to teach it if the subject is not tested by the state.

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