Designing Quality Performance Assessments

What are Performance Assessments?

Assessing student learning is common practice for educators. Think about the most frequent type of assessment utilized in your classroom or school. Is it comprised of mostly multiple choice, recall questions? How much information about the depth of student learning are you able to gather from your current forms of assessment? Designing and implementing quality performance assessments allows educators to provide rigorous, real-world connected tasks to assess student learning. Classroom instructors and school leaders can think beyond "what do students know?" and instead evaluate "how well can students use what they know?" (Hibbard, 1998). These assessments allow opportunities for applying knowledge and receiving specific feedback in a way that is meaningful and engaging.

The videos below provide additional details on Performance Assessments.

How can Performance Assessments benefit my students?

Because Performance Assessments often involve multi-step tasks, students are able to demonstrate their knowledge of content in a variety of ways. As such, teachers are provided a deeper, more specific, look at how students are able to apply their learning. Additionally, Performance Assessments often use checklists and/or rubrics. This allows students to know the expectations for proficient and exemplary work, but also provides a framework for the specific and timely feedback instructors can provide. There are a variety of ways educators can implement performance based assessments in their classrooms and schools. In any of the chosen designs, performance based assessments allow deeper learning experiences and increases engagement for students. See below for an example of a performance assessment as well as tips on how to get started.

How do I get started?

First, take time to explore the resources and literature on this site. You can find books, scholarly articles, podcasts, and the start of a Professional Learning Network.

Brualdi (2000) provides a set of steps for successfully designing and implementing Performance Assessments in your classroom:

• Define the Purpose of the Task

• Choose the Activity

• Define the Criteria

• Create Performance Rubric

• Assess the Performance

Exploring the resources here and using the above steps as an outline, you can begin assessing student learning in a more meaningful, relevant, and engaging way.