196 | chapter 8 | Performance Assessment
Suppose, for example, a teacher who had been instructing students in the pro-
cess of collaborative problem solving wanted to see whether students had acquired
this collaborative skill. The inference at issue centers on the extent to which each
student has mastered the skill. The educational decision on the line might be whether
particular students need additional instruction or, instead, whether it’s time to move
on to other curricular aims. The teacher’s real interest, then, is in how well students
can work with other students to arrive collaboratively at solutions to problems. In
Figure 8.1, you will see there are several assessment procedures that could be used
to get a fix on a student’s collaborative problem-solving skills. Yet, note that the two
selected-response assessment options (numbers 1 and 2) don’t really ask students
to construct anything. For the other three constructed-response assessment options
(numbers 3, 4, and 5), however, there are clear differences in the degree to which
the task presented to the student coincides with the class of tasks called for by the
teacher’s curricular aim. Assessment Option 5, for example, is obviously the closest
match to the behavior called for in the curricular aim. Yet, Assessment Option 4 is
surely more of a “performance test” than is Assessment Option 1.
figure 8.1 Set of Assessment Options That Vary in the Degree to Which a
A
Student’s Task Approximates the Curricularly Targeted Behavior
Curricular Aim
Assessment Students can solve
Options problems collaboratively.
5. Students work in small groups to solve
previously unencountered problems.
Teacher observes and judges their efforts.
4. Students are given a new problem, then
asked to write an essay regarding how
a group should go about solving it.
3. Students are asked a series of questions regarding
ways of solving problems collaboratively, then
asked to supply short answers to the questions.
2. Students answer a series of multiple-choice
tests about the next steps to take when
solving problems in groups.
1. Students respond to true-false
questions about the best procedures
to follow in group problem solving.
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What Is a Performance Test? | 197
It should be apparent to you, then, that different educators will be using
the phrase performance assessment to refer to very different kinds of assessment
approaches. Many teachers, for example, are willing to consider short-answer
and essay tests a form of performance assessment. In other words, those teachers
essentially equate performance assessment with any form of constructed-response
assessment. Other teachers establish more stringent requirements in order for a
measurement procedure to be described as a performance assessment. For exam-
ple, some performance-assessment proponents contend that genuine performance
assessments must possess at least three features:
Multiple evaluative criteria. The student’s performance must be judged using
more than one evaluative criterion. To illustrate, a student’s ability to speak
Spanish might be appraised on the basis of the student’s accent, syntax, and
vocabulary.
Prespecified quality standards. Each of the evaluative criteria on which a stu-
dent’s performance is to be judged is clearly explicated in advance of judging
the quality of the student’s performance.
Judgmental appraisal. Unlike the scoring of selected-response tests in which elec-
tronic computers and scanning machines can, once programmed, carry on with-
out the need of humankind, genuine performance assessments depend on human
judgments to determine how acceptable a student’s performance really is.
Looking back to Figure 8.1, it is clear that if the foregoing three requirements
were applied to the five assessment options supplied, Assessment Option 5 would
qualify as a performance test, and Assessment Option 4 probably would as well,
but the other three assessment options wouldn’t qualify under a definition of per-
formance assessment requiring the incorporation of multiple evaluative criteria,
prespecified quality standards, and judgmental appraisals.
A good many advocates of performance assessment would prefer that the
tasks presented to students represent real-world rather than school-world kinds of
problems. Other proponents of performance assessment would be elated simply
if more school-world measurement was constructed response rather than selected
response in nature. Still other advocates of performance testing want the tasks in
performance tests to be genuinely demanding—that is, way up the ladder of cogni-
tive difficulty. In short, proponents of performance assessment often advocate dif-
ferent approaches to measuring students on the basis of how they perform.
In light of the astonishing advances we now see every few weeks in the sorts
of computer-delivered stimuli for various kinds of assessment—performance tests
surely included—the potential nature of performance-test tasks seems practically
unlimited. For example, the possibility of digitally simulating a variety of authen-
tic performance-test tasks provides developers of performance tests with an ever-
increasing range of powerful performance assessments.
You’ll sometimes encounter educators who use other phrases to describe per-
formance assessment. For example, they may use the term authentic assessment
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