Alternative Academic Assessment

Alternative academic assessment (AAA) is a class of procedures that are commonly used to assess student progress within the context of the curriculum to inform instruction. AAA is described as alternative because the measurement approaches are often used as an alternative to published norm-referenced and criterion-referenced tests. The latter types of published tests dominated the measurement of academic achievement and aptitude for most of the past 100 years. AAA emerged within the past 30 years as a potential supplement or replacement for more traditional procedures and instruments (e.g., Iowa Test of Basic Skills, Wechsler Individualized Achievement Test).

Many AAA procedures can also be described as performance-based assessments or curriculum-based assessments (CBAs). These types of assessments typically rely on task demands and responses that are substantially similar to what might be observed during the process of instruction and learning. Production-type responses are more common than selection-type responses. That is, AAA procedures typically score the examinee's performance on the target behavior rather than a more convenient substitute. If reading is the behavior or interest, then the student's performance within the curriculum context is measured directly. For example, the examinee's oral reading rate might be measured while he or she reads aloud from a sample of curriculum and instructional materials. Similar procedures can be used in place of published tests that contain content dependent on curriculum and instructional materials or selection-type responses (e.g., multiple choice) that indirectly measure the target behaviors. Although there is a wide variety of AAAs, including CBA, curriculum-based measurement, CBA for instructional design, criterion-referenced curriculum-based assessment, curriculum-based evaluation, and informal reading inventories, most are characterized by procedures that measure production-type responses and stimulus content that are substantially similar to that of the curriculum and instructional materials. There are several advantages of AAAs, including efficiency of test development, administration, and scoring; the use of local norms; the utility for benchmarking and progress monitoring; and their utility within the problem-solving model.