Implementing Performance Assessment in the Classroom

Abstract

If you are like most teachers, it probably is a common practice for you to devise some sort of test to determine whether a previously taught concept has been learned before introducing something new to your students. Probably, this will be either a completion or multiple choice test. However, it is difficult to write completion or multiple choice tests that go beyond the recall level. For example, the results of an English test may indicate that a student knows each story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. However, these results do not guarantee that a student will write a story with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Because of this, educators have advocated the use of performance-based assessments.