194 | chapter 7 | Constructed-Response Tests
References
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July): 253–263.
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What Is a Performance Test? | 195
Performance Assessment
Chief Chapter During the early 1990s, a good many educational policy-
Outcome makers became enamored with performance assessment,
A sufficiently broad under which is an approach to measuring a student’s status based
standing of performance on the way the student completes a specified task. Theoreti-
assessment to distinguish cally, of course, when the student chooses between true and
between accurate and false for a binary-choice item, the student is completing a
inaccurate statements regarding task, although an obviously modest one. But the propo-
the nature of performance tests, nents of performance assessment have measurement
the identification of such tests’ schemes in mind that are meaningfully different from
tasks, and the scoring of binary-choice or multiple-choice tests. Indeed, it was a dis-
students’ performances satisfaction with traditional paper-and-pencil tests that
caused many educators to travel eagerly down the perfor-
mance-testing trail.
What Is a Performance Test?
Before digging into what makes performance tests tick and how you might use
them in your own classroom, we’d best explore the chief attributes of such an
assessment approach. Even though all educational tests, as noted earlier, require
students to perform in some way, when most educators talk about performance
tests, they are thinking about assessments in which the student is required to con-
struct an original response. More often than not, an examiner (such as the teacher)
observes the process of construction so that observation of the student’s perfor-
mance and judgment of that performance are required. More than four decades
ago, Fitzpatrick and Morrison (1971) observed that “there is no absolute distinc-
tion between performance tests and other classes of tests.” They pointed out that
the distinction between performance assessments and more conventional tests is
chiefly the degree to which the examination simulates the criterion situation—that
is, the extent to which the examination approximates the kind of student behav-
iors about which we wish to make inferences.
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