Performance Assessment

Performance assessment, also known as alternative assessment, is a method of educational evaluation based on the measurement of an individual's proficiency at executing various complex tasks, such as writing an essay, following a lab protocol, or solving multistepped problems. Equal attention is paid to the how and why answers or solutions are reached for the results. By attending to the learner's practices, educators can identify and correct flaws in action and reasoning. In this way, it is argued, assessments can more effectively evaluate and remediate learning.

Practitioners of performance assessment hold that their evaluation methods provide a wider array of skills and information for measurement and analysis. They add that its residual effects are improved lesson planning and teaching practices. Advocates further argue that their practices are [Page 636]more flexible at evaluating, and adjusting the processes and strategies students use in problem solving. These practitioners explain that standardized tests simply evaluate the collection of static information without determining the learner's capacity to employ that information in answering more complex questions. Performance assessment, it is offered, provide instructors with greater insight into an individual's thinking processes.

As a means of improving teaching practices, performance assessment calls on teachers to attend to the methods and procedures of learning, to help students integrate knowledge and skills in creating a personal toolkit for problem solving and integrating concepts and ideas. This calls for educators to aggressively facilitate learners' need for sources, tools, and time devoted to their problems, along with a meaningful curriculum, reflecting the real-life problems. Such dramatic changes will require many to restructure curriculum, modify testing methods and timetables, and redefine workloads and job descriptions of teachers and administrators.

Performance assessment calls for greater interaction among teachers and students and a more intensive observation of a learner's actions, reasoning, and development. Classrooms will need to see better cooperation and more collaborative projects. Learning will need to be more hands-on and interactive as learners construct knowledge and practices. Educators will need to give greater attention, to individual students and to the methods and procedures that they themselves use as they assist learners in choreographing and refining their actions and competencies.

Performance assessment is a topic of growing importance in curriculum studies because it presents an alternative to current standardized testing regimens. Critics of present evaluation methods, question their effectiveness in measuring real learning, the validity of what is being tested, and how well these assessments inform and remediate student's practices. The full implementation of performance assessment will call for changes in how lessons and skills are presented and how facts, theories, and concepts are integrated into learning. Educators have long searched for evaluation tools that are fair, accurate, and provide meaningful and timely data that informs students and instructors alike. Performance assessment offers new and promising methods for evaluation as well as unique sources for measurement. Along with this, it demands a greater investment of time, effort, and resources, factors hindering its broader implementation by school districts.

Critics of standardized testing systems point to serious problems and consequences created by test-driven curriculum programs, citing problems such as time limits on exams, limited response choices, and answers that are short, meaningless, and decontextualized. No Child Left Behind funding, based on standardized assessment programs, has the consequence of fostering bad practices, disrupting class and study time to teach to the tests that will evaluate their performance. This may lead some schools that are most in need of time for studies and thoughtful and expansive learning to cede that time to repetition, drilling, and prepackaged lessons.

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