Howard Gardner says...
Howard Gardner calls for performance tests, not quick responses or multiple choice or short-answer tests. He calls it “a performance of understanding.”
Thanks to hundreds of studies during the past few decades by psychologists and educators, we now know one truth about understanding: Most students in most schools cannot exhibit appreciable understanding of important ideas.
“Measures of understanding” may seem demanding, particularly in contrast to current, often superficial, efforts to measure what students know and are able to do. And, indeed, recourse to performing one’s understanding is likely to stress students, teachers, and parents, who have grown accustomed to traditional ways of doing (or NOT doing) things. Nonetheless, a performance approach to understanding is justified. Instead of mastering content, one thinks about the reason why a particular content is being taught and how best to display one’s comprehension of this content in a publicly accessible way. When students realize they will have to apply knowledge and demonstrate insights in a public form, they assume a more active stance to the material, seeking to exercise their “performance muscles” whenever possible.
Page 160 to 161 Intelligence Reframed (1999) by Howard Gardner
A student demonstrates or “performs” his understanding when he can examine a range of species found in different ecological niches and speculate about the reasons for their particular ensemble of traits.
A student performs her understanding of the Holocaust when she can compare events in a Nazi concentration camp to such contemporary genocidal events as those in Bosnia, Kosovo or Rwanda in the 1990s.