SHIFTING FROM STANDARDIZED TESTING TO PERFORMANCE BASED ASSESSMENT

Shifting from Standardized Testing to Performance Based Assessment

Shifting from Standardized Testing to Performance Based Assessment

Introduction

As our country still reels from the No Child Left Behind Act, we continue to struggle with its legacy of testing, testing, and more testing. Thankfully, parents, teachers, school reformers, and even students are speaking out against the overuse of standardized tests which are used punitively rather than formatively, and do little to improve the quality of teaching and learning going on in classrooms. In fact, many have argued that the “drill and kill” method of teaching these high stakes tests encourage actually hinders real learning and does little to help us bridge our nation's achievement gap.

Discussion

Billions of dollars are spent each year on education, yet there is widespread dissatisfaction with our educational system among educators, parents, policymakers, and the business community. Efforts to reform and restructure schools have focused attention on the role of assessment in school improvement. After years of increases in the quantity of formalized testing and the consequences of poor test scores, many educators have begun to strongly criticize the measures used to monitor student performance and evaluate programs. They claim that traditional measures fail to assess significant learning outcomes and thereby undermine curriculum, instruction, and policy decisions(Rabinowitz 2009).

The higher the stakes, the greater the pressure that is placed on teachers and administrators to devote more and more time to prepare students to do well on the tests. As a consequence, narrowly focused tests that emphasize recall have led to a similar narrowing of the curriculum and emphasis on rote memorization of facts with little opportunity to practice higher-order thinking skills. The timed nature of the tests and their format of one right answer has led teachers to give students practice in responding to artificially short texts and selecting the best answer rather than inventing their own questions or answers. When teachers teach to traditional tests by providing daily skill instruction in formats that closely resemble tests, their instructional practices are both ineffective and potentially detrimental due to their reliance on outmoded theories of learning and instruction.

Characteristics of Good Assessment

Good assessment information provides accurate estimates of student performance and enables teachers or other decisionmakers to make appropriate decisions. The concept of test validity captures these essential characteristics and the extent that an assessment actually measures what it is intended to measure, and permits appropriate generalizations about students' skills and abilities. For example, a ten-item addition/subtraction test might be administered to a student who answers nine items correctly. If the test is valid, we can safely generalize that the student will likely do as well on similar items not included on the test. The results of a good test or assessment, in short, represent something beyond how students perform on a certain task or a particular set of items; they represent how a student performs on the objective which those items were intended to assess(Marzano 2003).

Measurement experts agree that test validity is tied to ...