The Role of Assessment in Teaching

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Performance Tests

In recent years many teachers and measurement experts have argued that the typical written test should be used far less often because it reveals little or nothing of the depth of students' knowledge and how students use their knowledge to work through questions, problems, and tasks. The solution that these experts have proposed is to use one or more of what are called performance tests.
Performance tests attempt to assess how well students use foundational knowledge to perform complex tasks under more or less realistic conditions. At the low end of the realism spectrum, students may be asked to construct a map, interpret a graph, or write an essay under highly standardized conditions. That is, everyone completes the same task in the same amount of time and under the same conditions. At the high end of the spectrum, students may be asked to conduct a science experiment, produce a painting, or write an essay under conditions that are similar to those of real life. For example, students may be told to produce a compare-and-contrast essay on a particular topic by a certain date, but the resources students choose to use, the number of revisions they make, and when they work on the essay are left unspecified. As we noted in Chapter 5, when performance testing is conducted under such realistic conditions, it is also called authentic assessment (Meyer, 1992). Another term that is often used to encompass both performance testing and authentic assessment, and to distinguish them from traditional written tests, is alternative assessment. In this section we will first define the four different types of performance tests and then look at their most important characteristics.

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Types of Performance Tests
Currently, there are four ways in which the performance capabilities of students are typically assessed: direct writing assessments, portfolios, exhibitions, and demonstrations.