Developing Performance-Based Assessments, Grades 6-12

Nancy P. Gallavan

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781452296180
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book guides educators through an assessment process that is fully integrated with the daily curriculum and designed to significantly improve student performance.

1

Examining the Many Purposes of Assessment

How can I be sure that my students learn what I am teaching and what they are supposed to be learning? How can I involve students in their own growth and understanding? What kinds of tests should I be giving? How do I construct a test? How often should I give tests? What if my students do not do well? What if I don’t like giving tests? Do I have other choices? And what do my comments on daily work and tests actually mean to my students? What do my assessments tell me about my teaching?

Do these questions sound familiar to you? Inquiries like these questions challenge most teachers, and like them, you may not feel adequately prepared to assess your learners. You tend to spend most of your time reviewing your content, perfecting your teaching strategies, and collecting resource materials. Then, as you get ready to put it all into action, you realize that your assessments need attention.

As a middle-level and/or secondary school teacher, you want to develop the most valuable activities and successful assignments so your students actively engage in the learning, easily connect new learning to their personal lives, and eagerly generate appropriate evidence showing that they truly understand or “get it.” Your mission is to check their learning using appropriate performance-based assessments that are purposeful for you and your learners.

Demystify Performance-Based Assessments

Before delving into when, what, and how to assess to answer the questions posed at the start of this chapter, let’s look at 12 general concepts related to assessment that establish a firm foundation. Teachers spend 30 percent to 40 percent, maybe as much as 90 percent of their time preparing, administering, analyzing, intervening, documenting, and reporting assessments (Campbell & Evans, 2000), so understanding performance-based assessments is critical.

However, experience reveals that many classroom teachers have found both the conversations and the processes related to developing performance-based assessments to be complicated and perplexing. Therefore, some teachers tend to avoid using performance-based assessments, while other teachers have adopted some misconceptions about performance-based assessments. It is important for us to demystify and clarify these ideas early in this text, so that developing performance-based assessments will be easy for you.

Define Performance-Based Assessments

1. Assessment means much more than just a test. Every time you check to see if your learners understand or “get it,” you are conducting an assessment. You assess when you observe activities, listen to discussions, read written responses, view drawn illustrations, watch performances, and pay attention to body language. You assess before the learning, during the learning, and after the learning; you assess formally and informally, directly and indirectly, by choice and by chance. You spend most of your teaching time assessing your learners. This text describes many different practices, and the suggestions guide you in using performance-based assessments to improve the learning and, consequently, to enhance the teaching and the schooling.

2. Almost all assessments are performance-based assessments. You may have come to believe that only when learners are demonstrating outcomes such as reading aloud, calculating a math problem, conducting a science experiment, giving a speech, or turning a cartwheel that they are involved in performance-based assessments. Asking learners to respond to a discussion question, to complete a worksheet, or to take a written test are other viable forms of performance-based assessments that you use frequently. After all, the learners are performing by demonstrating outcomes through speaking and writing.

3. Assessment involves the learning, the teaching, and the schooling. During assessment, you are collecting all sorts of feedback and data describing the effectiveness of everyone involved in the classroom. Learning cannot happen effectively unless teaching and schooling are working effectively too. Assessments do not pertain solely to your classroom and your learners’ achievements. When you visualize your classroom, it is essential that you always view assessments holistically within a specific context occurring before, during, and after instruction; happening in your classroom, extending throughout the school, and connecting with the entire community; as viewed by the learners, the learners’ families, the teacher, the school administrators, the school community, and the state.

4. Assessment drives learning, teaching, and schooling. As you develop your curriculum and design your instruction, you should be asking yourself four vital questions:

a. What do my learners need and want to know?

b. How should and could my learners show what they know?

c. What should and could my learners do and when?

d. Where will the assessments and feedback tell me to go (with my curricular design, instructional practices, resource materials, learning community, individual needs, program organization, and professional development)?

The four key words are know, show, do, and go. In the planning process, you decide what to teach, how to teach it, when to teach it, and so forth; you also must decide how your students will demonstrate or could show you what they have learned all along the way. And from each assessment, you must decide where to go next.

As you teach, ask yourself: Did I cover everything? Did I include enough depth, breadth, and connections? Were my directions clear? Do the students understand the reasons for learning? Do I need to reteach any of the curriculum? Do I need to repeat, revise, or rearrange any of the instruction? Are the learners ready to integrate and apply their accomplishments in new and different ways? You cannot make your next moves without deliberately collecting evidence and carefully analyzing where you are now, before you begin. It is essential that you view assessments holistically, as a shared process with ongoing reflection, inspection, and communication; assessments are not just an end to your learning experience (aka, lesson plans) or unit of learning.

Involve Learning Options and Opportunities

5. Assessments need to be appropriate and authentic. When you are checking the learning, you want to use a practice of assessment that best fits the specific learning situation. For example, if you want to elicit authentic feedback about your learners’ spelling abilities, you could give a traditional spelling test listing words in isolation, you could ask your learners to incorporate the words into a description or story that features the words, or you could integrate the words into various parts of the curricular content so your learners use the words in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. The last two suggested practices are the most appropriate and authentic, as they are realistic for learning the words and using them in context to be remembered for future learning and applied for life.

6. Learners should be given (and should help develop) alternative assessments. Too often the word alternative conveys learning situations with less academic rigor or reduced scholarly expectations developed for learners who have been identified as unable to succeed in the “regular” classroom. In performance-based assessments, alternative merely means different ways or other choices and options. Perhaps the assessment would be unique or unusual, but alternative assessments do not entail or require unconventional or scary methods. The ideas offered throughout this text explore how to develop alternative assessments for and with your learners that are appropriate and authentic. When you include your learners, they will be quite impressed and resonate once you give them voice, choice, and a sense of ownership or agency (Bandura, 1989). Giving learners voice, choice, and ownership will greatly increase student attendance, engagement, achievement, and completion.

Incorporate Teaching Principles and Practices

7. Assessments must include salience—that is, assessments must be important and relevant. The forms of appraisal that you are using and the types of information that you are seeking should match the learning and learners, the teaching and teacher, and the curriculum and context. You want to develop assessments that you can describe as the best investment of everyone’s time and energy. Try to avoid conducting assessments just to gather and record data because you presume you should. Your students (and their families) need to know why, when, how, and on what learners will be assessed before you begin the instruction. Your forms of appraisal must be germane to the content and processes; the outcomes must be significant for the learning to be recognized now, integrated later, and used throughout life.

8. Assessments must include validity—that is, assessments must be suitable and applicable. Again, it is all about a justified fit. You must be able to defend how the selected form of appraisal will elicit a particular type of information. At some point, a learner, parent, colleague, and/or administrator will ask you to explain your choices based on legitimate purposes and detailed procedures. And you want to be sure your learners can demonstrate proficiency with the content and processes in ways that are developmentally appropriate and rightfully showcase their accomplishments and achievements.

9. Assessments must include reliability—that is, assessments must be dependable and consistent. To be reliable means you can count on the assessment every time you use it to give constant results. You want to be able to explain the significance or why this assessment is the most effective and efficient. Once you begin teaching, most likely you will create a group of 5 to 10 forms of appraisal probing 5 to 10 types of information that you will use nearly every time you assess your learners. Your learners (and their families) will appreciate consistency in your practices of assessment, and you can refine and expand your routine with time and experience.

10. Assessments must include fidelity—that is, assessments must be understandable and objective. Fidelity ensures the purpose(s) of your assessments. Your assessments must be planned, prepared, and conducted so that you and your learners clearly comprehend what is being assessed, how it will be assessed, and why it is being assessed. In order for your assessments to be effective, you must attend to the clarity and fairness of your communications in the directions and questions on the assessments followed by the feedback and scoring after the assessments.

11. Assessments must include robustness—that is, assessments must be deliberate and mindful of depth, breadth, and opportunity. Assessments should be long enough to cover the subject yet short enough to be interesting. Learners must be allowed to provide adequate evidence of their learning with assorted ways of expressing their knowledge, skills, and dispositions. You want your assessments to serve as the capstone to the immediate learning and to provide the connection to the next adventure.

12. Assessment must include expectations. You need to determine through narrative description, checklist, percentage, and so forth the levels of proficiency that are satisfactory and unsatisfactory for each assessment. You have to decide in advance of the assessment, scoring, and feedback if and how learners will have demonstrated mastery of each objective.

Assessments are easy to unde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Introduction
• 1. Examining the Many Purposes of Assessment
• 2. Planning Assessments to Promote Understanding
• 3. Collecting Baseline Data for Preassessments
• 4. Aligning Appropriate Formative Assessments
• 5. Incorporating Learning, Assigning Instruction Followed by Feedback and Correction
• 6. Administering Summative Assessments
• 7. Identifying What to Assess: Inviting the Five Types of Inquiry and Information
• 8. Analyzing How to Assess: Applying the Five Forms of Appraisal and Authentication
• 9. Creating Assessment Templates and Rubrics
• 10. Conducting Evaluation and Accountability
• References and Readings
• Index