Performance-Based Assessment for 21st-Century Skills

Copyright © 2014 Prufrock Press Inc.

Edited by Rachel Taliaferro

Cover design by Raquel Trevino and layout design by Allegra Denbo

ISBN-13: 978-1-61821-275-7

The purchase of this book entitles the buyer to reproduce student activity pages for single classroom use only. Other use requires written permission of publisher. All rights reserved.

At the time of this book’s publication, all facts and figures cited are the most current available. All telephone numbers, addresses, and website URLs are accurate and active. All publications, organizations, websites, and other resources exist as described in the book, and all have been verified. The author and Prufrock Press Inc. make no warranty or guarantee concerning the information and materials given out by organizations or content found at websites, and we are not responsible for any changes that occur after this book’s publication. If you find an error, please contact Prufrock Press Inc.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

What Is Performance-Based Assessment?

CHAPTER 1

A Case for Performance-Based Assessment

CHAPTER 2

Advantages of Performance-Based Assessment

CHAPTER 3

Types of Performance-Based Assessment

CHAPTER 4

How To Teach Performance-Based Assessment

CHAPTER 5

How To Evaluate Performance-Based Assessment With Rubrics

CHAPTER 6

How to Make the Performance-Based Assessment Authentic

CONCLUSION

REFERENCES

APPENDIX A

Reproducibles

APPENDIX B

Mock Trial Sample Lesson

APPENDIX C

Additional Examples of Performance-Based Assessment Lessons

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Introduction

What is Performance-Based Assessment?

Before you begin to figure out just exactly how you are going to use performance-based assessment (PBA) in your classroom, it is important to have a good understanding of the subject matter. Math teachers need to understand equations in order to teach them to students, and language arts instructors need to have a good grasp of grammar if they expect their students to follow suit. If you want to use PBA in your classroom and make it effective, it is important you understand what it is and what you can do with it. Like most things in education, there can be multiple interpretations of a concept. Let us start with a simple definition and work our way to a more complex one.

According to the Project Appleseed (2010) website, the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress describes performance assessments as: … testing that requires a student to create an answer or a product that demonstrates his or her knowledge or skills (para. 2). That is a pretty simple and broad definition. A clever gifted student could probably make a compelling argument that filling in bubbles on a multiple-choice test is creating an answer, but in the spirit of the definition, objective assessments such as multiple-choice tests do not qualify as performance-based assessments. However, writing an essay does qualify as creating—the student must create his answer, deciding how to state the information he wants to include to construct his thesis. Again, our illustrious gifted student might make an argument that this is not a performance. He might say that a performance should be a display of skills, like acting out a play or playing a musical instrument. Writing an essay is a display of skills, however—one that demonstrates what the student knows. That much is evident from this more complex definition of performance-based assessment from Project Appleseed (2010):

Performance assessment requires students to demonstrate knowledge and skills, including the process by which they solve problems. Performance assessments measure skills such as the ability to integrate knowledge across disciplines, contribute to the work of a group, and develop a plan of action when confronted with a new situation. (para. 1)

The key word in this definition is process. Performance-based assessment is a process. Student learning is not displayed only in the summative assessments traditional classes give at the end of a unit. What students learn is on display throughout the process of working on an activity. Sometimes this is a concrete product, such as a physical object that students build, or an intangible product, such as a fact they display through an essay. Other times the performance is less concrete, when a student is asked to think creatively or to overcome a problem. Getting the right answer is not necessarily the end-all, be-all goal. How students arrive at an answer can be just as, if not more, important than the answer itself.

Given this definition, it probably sounds as if just about anything could be considered a performance-based assessment. However, there are certain guidelines PBAs generally follow. For instance, the National Science Foundation’s (2003; Stevenson, 2001) science and engineering indicators suggest performance-based assessments usually:

■allow students to create their own response rather than to choose between several already created answers,

■are criterion-referenced, or provide a standard according to which a student’s work is evaluated rather than in comparison with other students,

■concentrate on the problem-solving process rather than on just obtaining the correct answer, and

■require that trained teachers or others carefully evaluate the assessments and provide consistency across scorers (Stevenson, 2001, para. 4).

We will explore these guidelines in much more depth later in the book.

These different definitions of and parameters for PBA are all very well and good, but what does the actual process look like? If I walked into a class in which a teacher was using performance-based assessment, what would I see? Below are some examples according to Project Appleseed (2010):

■group projects enabling a number of students to work together on a complex problem that requires planning, research, internal discussion, and group presentation;

■essays assessing students’ understanding of a subject through a written description, analysis, explanation, or summary;

■experiments testing how well students understand scientific concepts and can carry out scientific processes;

■demonstrations giving students opportunities to show their mastery of subject-area content and procedures; or

■portfolios allowing students to provide a broad portrait of their performance through files that contain collections of students’ work assembled over time (para. 3).

Now that you have a basic understanding of what performance-based assessment is and what it might look like, it is time to explain this book’s three goals: (1) to convince you why performance-based assessment should be used over other methods of teaching, (2) to show how it can be used in the classroom for effective student understanding, and (3) to show where it can take you as a teacher in your professional development.

I hope this introduction gives you a basic understanding of what performance-based assessment is. The first chapter of this book will make a compelling case for why a teacher should use performance-based assessment and the 21st-century skills it builds in students. Chapter 2 will discuss the advantages of using PBA in the classroom, including what it will allow a teacher to do with students that more traditional methods will not and why these are beneficial to teaching and learning. Chapter 3 will explore in more depth various examples of PBA and what skills each one will provide for students. Chapter 4 will explain how to teach students the ways they can use PBA to its fullest extent. Because students are sometimes used to a more traditional setting, they must be trained how to use PBA. One of the most pressing questions when using PBA is how one should evaluate it. This is one of the trickiest aspects of PBA and one that must be deliberate in its set-up and execution. Chapter 5 will walk you through the steps of how to make this happen. Chapter 6 will take the concept of authentic assessment, a valuable part of any PBA classroom, and show you how to achieve it. The more authentic the assessment, the more enduring the learning is going to be. The book will conclude with words of advice on how to make the PBA process work for you and how to get the most from it in your classroom. There are three appendices. The first includes reproducibles that can be used to shape your own classroom using performance-based assessment. The second appendix contains a sample lesson plan for a mock trial in an elementary classroom. The third appendix includes lessons from some major content areas and different grade levels so that you have an idea of what PBA looks like and what can be done with it.

One of the sage pieces of advice given to writers is to show the story rather than tell it. Instead of saying a character is scared, a good author will describe how the hairs on the back of the character’s neck tingled with dread or how the air in her lungs built up to the point that she felt they were going to burst. This shows the reader the fear instead of simply stating it. The description is memorable and enduring. More traditional methods of assessment, such as multiple-choice tests, allow students to tell you what they know, but they do not show you how the students arrived at the answer, to what level of depth they understand it, or how they can take the information and make something new from it. In the real world, this is what you spend most of your life doing: showing, not telling. You want to get your students ready to be part of that 21st-century world.

Chapter 1

A Case for Performance-Based Assessment

It seems there is an objective multiple-choice test for everything. If you want to get into college, you have to take the SAT or ACT, often both. If you want to be a doctor or lawyer, you have to pass the MCAT or pass the bar exam. Even if you want to drive, you must first take a pencil-to-paper test in which you essentially determine which of four letters is more attractive than the others. The interesting aspect about all of these is that in order to show success in the field in which you take a test to get into, it always comes down to performance. You can score very high on the SAT or ACT, but in college you have to show up to classes and perform in order to succeed. As a doctor or lawyer, you may pass the MCAT or the bar, but the true merit of a successful doctor or lawyer is how well she performs in the field. Even passing the writing portion of your driver’s test does not necessarily correlate with how well you will perform once you get in the car and have to maneuver the vehicle on the road. With this logic, would we not be better off having people take tests that evaluate the performance rather than a multiple-choice assessment that evaluates memorization? Would this not be a better indicator of the success a person might have once he or she actually gets in the field and has to perform in the real world?

School systems spend nearly the entire year evaluating the performance of students. How well do they participate in class? How often do they get their homework completed? Do they show a deep understanding of the material and concepts being taught? And yet at the end of the year, we have it all boil down to an objective multiple-choice test that the state has dictated must be given to all students. Since the No Child Left Behind Act came out in 2001, we have been pushing students to tell us what they have learned on pencil-to-paper tests with a lot of accountability tied to the results. School districts are evaluated based on these scores, principals are held accountable when their schools do not perform well, and teachers feel the pressure for students to do well. Because of this, we have developed strategies for students to do better on these types of tests. One of those strategies involves modeling all assessments in the classroom so that students are familiar with both the format and the way the content is delivered. As a result, students are getting really good at filling in little bubbles. The problem is that they are losing those valuable performance-based abilities, many of which are 21st-century skills.

The powers that be in education are starting to realize the value in performance-based assessment. That is why a new state testing system, the PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers), will incorporate a performance aspect to it. Unlike the state tests of the past, which focus only on multiple-choice questions with some written responses, this test will be broken down into two parts. There will be the traditional end-of-year assessment in which students demonstrate their reading comprehension and mathematical problem-solving skills. The second part will be a performance assessment aspect that will look at students’ ability to analyze and understand how a problem is solved. There are 20 states already planning on using the PARCC Assessment with more sure to follow.

In addition, many states are employing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). These are learning objectives that many states are using to add rigor in the classroom and ensure we are producing 21st-century students who are ready to use these skills in a global work force. Many of the standards have the term real world in them just to make sure students get the point of how important being able to apply these skills in the real world is. Many of these CCSS are also written in a way that lends them to performance-based assessment. Take these examples of Common Core State Standards (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010a; 2010b):

CCSS ELA.Literacy.W.6.7: Conduct short research projects to answer a question, drawing on several sources and refocusing the inquiry when appropriate.

CCSS Math.Content.2.MD.D.10: Draw a picture graph and a bar graph to represent a data set with up to four categories. Solve simple put-together, take-apart, and compare problems using information presented in the bar graph.

How could a student conduct a short research project without producing a performance-based assessment, whether it is via a research paper or a presentation? Drawing picture and bar graphs are examples of PBAs in that students actually have to create something. The direction of education naturally takes us toward performance-based assessment. Wouldn’t you rather be on the rising tide of this movement rather than on the end of the crashing wave?

The reason for these changes is the realization that objective testing is not necessarily causing our students to have enduring understanding. Asian schools consistently score well on international academic tests and match this assessment practice by placing a heavy emphasis on rote memorization. The problem with this is that these very same students who score so well retain the information for the least amount of time, meaning they cannot apply what they have supposedly learned (Robbins, 2006). Is our goal as educators for students to know information just long enough to score well on the test, or is the goal for students to learn the content for life? If you think our goal is to provide an enduring understanding, PBA is the method that will best produce this:

An alternative method of evaluating students is performance assessment, which appraises students on items such as portfolios, projects, and writing samples. Students will be more prone to deep approach learning rather than superficial, temporary memorization of facts, and teachers will have the chance to spend semesters actually