Performance-Based Assessment

Educational reform in how and what students are taught has also led to reform in how students are assessed to determine content knowledge and skills. This entry provides information on one alternative model of assessment, performance-based assessment, which requires students to demonstrate their level of knowledge through the actual performance of an activity.

Selected-response tests have been the norm in schools for many years. Formats such as multiple choice, true/false, and matching allowed the teacher to quickly assess student knowledge, with high reliability and objective scoring. This was acceptable for determining a student's factual knowledge, but did not allow for an in-depth analysis of a student's higher-order thinking skills or problem-solving ability, and often did not work well for documenting state standards. A different method of assessment was needed, one that allowed students to demonstrate their knowledge through both the product and the process of developing the product. This led to the use of performance-based assessment.

This type of assessment has also been known as “authentic assessment,” as the student completed a “real” task; “alternative assessment,” as this was different from the traditional selected-response tests; “direct assessment,” as students were assessed on their ability to actually do the task; and finally “performance-based assessment,” as the emphasis was on student performance to demonstrate their [Page 694]understanding of the content. While these titles are not interchangeable, they all refer to allowing students to demonstrate their knowledge through a method different from the traditional paper-and-pencil format of answering teacher-designed questions.

Performance-based assessments allow for the integration of knowledge, skills, and abilities. With performance-based assessments, the emphasis is on both the process of completing the assignment and the final product. The assessment of students is often tied to the instruction, with realistic problem-solving situations used to allow for active construction of meaning. Complex performance-based assignments are considered to be a better choice for assessing student problem-solving and thinking skills than selected-response tests and more appropriate for current learning theory, which emphasizes that students learn best by being involved in the learning process and by using previous knowledge to build new knowledge through active involvement and inquiry.

Lynn Fuchs offered three key elements of performance-based assessments. The first was students constructing their own responses, in contrast to the teacher providing responses for the student to choose from. The second element was that teachers could observe students' performance as they participated in authentic tasks to assess how individual students were arriving at the answer. The last element was that a student's responses could provide information on the student's thinking and learning, not just documenting whether the student reported the correct answer.

Problems with performance-based assessment include the time required to construct and score the assessment. To construct a performance-based assessment, the teacher first needs to start with a clear objective of what the student is to learn. This often comes from state standards, with a more general objective then defined by specific learning outcomes. The outcomes need to be presented in observable, measurable language that allows both teacher and students to know exactly what is required. Once the outcomes are defined, a feasible and authentic type of product capable of being scored is defined. This must be “doable” within the settings available, similar to what might be expected in real-life situations when out of school, with observable process steps or a product that can be reliably scored.

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