Performance assessment making a comeback in schools

It might take more time and effort, its advocates say—but when done right it can lead to a deeper analysis of students’ skills

By Dennis Pierce, Editor
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Spurred by a federal directive to use “multiple measures” of student success, performance assessment is reemerging as a strategy to delve more deeply into students’ skills.

In a darkened classroom at Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School in Devens, Mass., 15-year-old Tom Grigglestone is giving a PowerPoint presentation of what he’s learned in math this past semester—and how he’s applied this knowledge to a project he designed.

“I can predict where the NASDAQ will be when I know where the ‘Footsie’ has ended up,” he says, referring to the FTSE, an index of the 100 biggest companies on the London Stock Exchange.

He takes his audience through a series of slides that explain how to find the correlation between two random sets of data by using simple linear regression—pretty advanced stuff for a high school sophomore. In this case, his “audience” is just one person: his teacher, Nathan Soule, who scribbles notes on a sheet of paper as Tom is talking.

Tom is practicing for an exhibition, which the school calls a “gateway exercise,” that he must complete before advancing to the next grade level—like a graduate student’s oral examinations. Parker’s gateway exercises are a classic example of performance-based assessment, in which students show their understanding not by filling in bubbles on a standardized test but by producing actual work—an essay, a lab report, a presentation, a portfolio, or some other demonstration of competency.

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Performance assessment is what teachers do every day when they grade students’ projects and assignments, but often this work is not part of the high-stakes system that determines whether students are ready to graduate—or whether schools as a whole are making progress.

For a while in the 1990s, that was starting to change, as states like Connecticut, Nebraska, and Wyoming were developing large-scale performance assessment systems. But the dawning of No Child Left Behind “pushed aside” these efforts, because it was too costly for states to include performance assessment in their statewide accountability systems under the law, said Joan Herman, director of UCLA’s National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing.

Now, the tide is turning again.