There are, however, unintended consequences of this shift from teacher-centered classroom activities toward student-centered learning. In particular, the authentic assessment strategies that are used with Internet-based activities are often in conflict with the usual process by which the schools report student grades. Replacing traditional testing with performance assessment is inefficient, expensive, and does not lend itself to mass testing with quick turnaround time (Madaus, 1989, p. 28), but it is a reasonable approach to use, especially when dealing with authentic student-generated products. Moreover, with authentic performance assessments such as Work Sampling, in which teachers systematically sample and assess students' progress over the school year (Meisels, 1996), this conflict can be resolved.
Though resources and strategies are changing, in many districts the issue of assessment--especially authentic assessment of Internet-based projects and activities--has not been examined in detail. Many teachers feel that assessment of student-created projects is subjective, especially for research projects that involve resources accessed on the World Wide Web (or simply, "the Web") or student-generated online products and home pages. In a focus group with local teachers that dealt with integrating Internet-based lessons into the curriculum, one teacher commented:
We need to find out: Did they like it? How easy was it for them? What do they think they learned? We need to decide on the goals and objectives that would then determine the assessment. Is it skills? Attitude? Finding information? Internalizing information? Creating something? (A teacher from the Boulder Valley School District)To find a solution to this problem, we must explore what it means to teach for performance. In brief, it means making a clear link between your learning objectives and the performance tasks, projects, and exhibits that you expect your students to produce--a clear link between your goal of teaching for understanding and establishing clear performance targets for your students (McTighe, 1996, p. 1).
The process of creating an aligned lesson begins establishing goals, defining a set of learning objectives, analyzing the skills, prior knowledge, and learning styles of your students, and reviewing and selecting existing instructional materials. To create your set of learning objectives, it's best to start with your content standards. Teachers in Texas would use the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills; Vermont teachers would use Vermont's Framework of Standards and Learning Opportunities; you may use whatever set of content standards your state, district, or school has selected. It's important to note that, though national standards such as the U.S. and world history standards and the NCTM standards are used as resources in creating the latest versions of textbooks, publishers assert that states' standards or curriculum frameworks, especially those in major textbook-adoption states such as California and Texas, are more likely to shape the content found in their texts (Manzo, 1997, p. 1).
Once you've selected the content standards your lesson will address, the next step is to design an assessment rubric that is aligned with the lesson. To do this, you will need to define at least three performance standards that convey meeting the content standard, exceeding the content standard, and "in progress" toward meeting the content standard. You can name your performance standards anything you want. Moreover, you are not restricted to three levels; you can use "emerging, proficient, exceptional"; or "1, 2, 3, 4, 5"; or "beginning, developing, accomplished, exemplary". What is important is that your building or district--including parents, students, other teachers, and administrators--has a common understanding and usage of each performance standard in assessing student work.
Next, you'll need to clearly articulate what each performance standard looks like in practice. There are two ways to articulate standards: you may use clearly stated quality indicators or definitions of what each standard represents; or you may use samples of student work, or "anchors", that demonstrate how the sample met or did not meet performance standards. The key to effective performance and valid scoring is setting standards and criteria in advance. Scoring criteria make public both what is being judged and the accompanying standards for acceptable performance.
For those who are not familiar with the term "rubric", it simply refers to the scoring form or matrix that contains the criteria to be judged. A rubric is an assessment scoring guide that describes student work at different levels of performance. It has three essential features: evaluative criteria which are used to distinguish acceptable responses from unacceptable responses; quality definitions which describe the way that qualitative differences in students' responses are to be judged; and a scoring strategy that tells the teachers how to aggregate all of the evaluative criteria, either holistically or analytically, into an overall score (Popham, 1997). Figures 1 and 2 present examples of a "holistic" rubric and an "analytic" rubric. A good rule of thumb to follow when you develop your own rubric is this--will it fit on a single page, yet can it still capture the key evaluative criteria that you need to judge your students' responses?
| 5 | Topic is addressed clearly. Speech is loud enough and easy to understand. Good eye contact. Visual aids are used effectively. Well-organized. |
| 4 | Topic is addressed adequately. Speech has appropriate volume. Eye contact is intermittent. Visual aids help presentation. Good organization. |
| 3 | Topic is addressed adequately. Speech volume is erratic. Student reads notes - erratic eye contact. Visual aids do not enhance speech. Speech gets "off track" in places. |
| 2 | Topic needs more explanation. Speech is difficult to hear at times. Lack of adequate eye contact. Poor visual aids. Lack of organization. |
| 1 | Speech does not address topic. Speech cannot be heard. Very little eye contact. No visual aids. No organization. |
| Evaluative Criteria | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Organization | Little or nothing is written. Essay is disorganized and poorly developed. Does not stay on topic. Essay is incomplete. | It lacks an introduction, well-developed body, or conclusion. Coherence and logic are attempted but inadequate. | The essay is well organized. It is coherent, ordered logically, and fully developed. |
| Sentence Structure | Student writes frequent run-ons or fragments. | Occasional errors in sentence structure. Little variety in sentence length or structure. | Sentences are complete and varied in length and structure. |
| Usage | Student makes frequent errors in word choice and agreement. | Student makes occasional errors in word choice and agreement. | Usage is correct. Word choice is appropriate. |
| Mechanics | Student makes frequent errors in spelling, punctuation, and capitalization | Student makes occasional errors in mechanics. | Spelling, capitalization, and punctuation are correct. |
| Format | Format is sloppy. There are no margins or indents. Handwriting is inconsistent. | The margins and indents have inconsistencies - no title or has inappropriate title. | The format is correct. The title is appropriate. The margins and indents are consistent. |
A rubric gives your students feedback on their performance. It tells them what you expect them to accomplish in the lesson and what they need to do in order to improve their performance. Since not every student will immediately understand your criteria or how to apply them to their own work, it is important for you to provide models of excellence for them. As McTighe mentions, "if we expect students to do excellent work, they need to know what excellent work looks like" (McTighe, 1996, p. 4).
You can use anchors as examples of each performance standard. For example, The WEB Project (http://www.webproject.org) in Vermont uses a holistic rubric, with several digitized, student-generated works of art as anchors. By providing your students with examples of both excellent and mediocre work, and asking them to analyze the differences and identify the characteristics that distinguish them, you'll help your students learn the criteria by which you intend to evaluate them by seeing tangible examples of student-generated products.
Focusing attention on performance standards, not normed performance, allows you to provide your students with more usable, customized, and timely feedback so that they can adjust both their products and their learning strategies on an ongoing basis. When used for improving student work, rubrics act as both an assessment and an instructional tool. Teachers often share their rubrics with their students by introducing assignments with an explanation of what they are expected to learn, and how their tests, performances, or products will be evaluated. Some teachers include students in developing rubrics so as to involve students in the acceptance and use of rubrics in the learning process. As a result, they are helping their students become more self-directed, more able to distinguish between poor and high quality work, and more likely to be able to evaluate, revise, and improve their own work (McTighe, 1997, p. 4).
Assessments can draw upon a myriad of testing or measurement tasks ranging from informal, teacher designed activities to standardized, norm-referenced tests. When assigning tasks to your students, it is also important to explicitly teach them the strategies that they need to succeed in performing these tasks. Some helpful strategies that work well with small groups of students are reading comprehension activities such as questioning, summarizing, predicting, and negotiating conflicts (Brown and Palincsar, 1989); sharing research results, knowledge, and expertise within a learning group, culminating in a common product or performance that demands that all participants have learned about all aspects of a joint topic (Brown & Campione, in press); or Aronson's (1978) jigsaw method in which learners are divided into small groups which explore a specific topic and then reassemble to share their findings with the rest of the class. Individual strategies such as cognitive mapping, outlining, or using "epistemic forms" (Sherry & Trigg, 1996)--simple graphical schemes for organizing information such as maps, lists, charts, or block diagrams--can also prove helpful. These visual representations of student knowledge can then be incorporated into the finished product or performance.
Most states are redesigning their state assessments to measure student achievement of content standards. We encourage you to use a variety of mechanisms to assess student needs and progress. Figure 4 lists twenty ideas for alternative assessment strategies that have been used successfully by other teachers.
| Book Response Journals | Similar to a learning log, the book response journal is a place for students to express personal reactions and to wonder about events, themes, and ideas in a book. |
| Comparison Charts | Comparison charts are one of a number of graphic organizers. They involve the examinations of similarities and differences among ideas, events, characteristics, etc. |
| Conferences | There are many types of conferences including reading, writing, goal-setting, evaluation, and coaching. The major purposes are to collaborate, assess, and guide. |
| Cooperative Learning Activities | Cooperative learning involves students working together in groups (often following a teacher presented lesson), with group goals and individual accountability. Critical to the process are two factors: 1) how to help another student without giving the answer; and 2) how to work together toward a common goal. |
| Demonstrations | A demonstration transforms ideas into something concrete and observable through video, audio, art, drama, movement, and/or music. |
| Discussion | A discussion provides a safe, open forum where children are encouraged to speak, listen, and respond to opinions, feelings, and ideas regarding the designated topic. |
| Goal Setting | Setting goals with children provides the basis for monitoring student performance through collaboration and self reflection. Graffiti Walls Graffiti walls are free form spaces for brainstorming or communicating words, phrases, or ideas on a topic. These are often used as evolving records. |
| "I Learned" Statements | "I Learned" statements may be in either written or oral form. Their purpose is merely to give students a chance to self-select one or more of the things they learned during a class session, an investigation, or a series of lessons. |
| Interviews | An interview is structured or unstructured dialogue with students in which the student reports his/her reaction or response to a single question or a series of questions. |
| Investigations | Investigations may be related to a specific subject area or may involve several areas, integrating curriculum. The most typical form of investigation is a collection of student writing, diagrams, graphs, tables, charts, posters, experiments and other products. |
| KWLs | A KWL is a technique used by teachers to assess what students "know", "wish to know", and "have learned" about a particular topic, using a sheet divided into three columns labeled K, W, L. At the beginning of a lesson, the KWL serves as a written record of the student's prior knowledge (K) on the topic, and allows the student to note what they desire (W) to know about the topic. Following the lesson, the student can self-assess what has actually been learned (L) about the topic. |
| Learning Logs | A learning log is a kind of journal that enables students to write across the curriculum. The major reason for using them is to encourage children to be in control of their own learning and to promote thinking through writing. |
| Oral Attitude Surveys | Attitude surveys note in a systematic manner students' self reflections regarding group and individual performance and affective characteristics such as effort, values, and interest. Providing an oral survey allows students to share their ideas, learn from others, and deepen the way they think about the topics being discussed. |
| Oral Presentations | Oral presentations include speeches, storytelling, retellings, recitations, drama, videos, debates, and oral interpretation and are evaluated according to a predetermined criteria. |
| Peer Evaluations | Peer evaluations consist of student analysis and assessment of peer proficiency using either established or self-generated criteria. An activity must be very carefully structured if students are to receive valid feedback from their peers. |
| Problem Solving Activities | In a problem solving activity, students must search for a means to find a solution, as well as for a solution to the problem. A good evaluation of the problem solving activity requires consideration of both the thinking process and the final product. |
| Products | Student products represent completed student work in a variety of forms; writing, videotapes, audiotapes, computer demonstrations, dramatic performances, bulletin boards, debates, etc. |
| Response Groups | Response groups are opportunities for small numbers of children to discuss books or events in depth with one another. Often these groups are organized and run by children themselves because they all have read the same book or experienced the same event and want to discuss it. |
| Self-Evaluations | A key concept in alternative assessment is having the student learn to recognize his/her own progress by taking the time to reflect. |
Portfolios are purposeful, collaborative, self-reflective collections of student work generated during the process of instruction. Because they contain samples of student performance over time, they can paint a rich developmental view of learning and achievement. There are various types of portfolios. Each is defined by its design and intended purpose. Although portfolios can fulfill several objectives at the same time, each must be carefully considered, since the collective mission will shape how they will be used in the classroom. Depending on its assessment purposes, a portfolio may contain a range of work over time; work selected by you, your students, or both; samples selected to show how the learning objectives were met; student self-reflection; your feedback; work-in-progress; best pieces; unsuccessful pieces; group and individual work; and rough drafts.
The variety of student products that can be found in portfolios is limited only by the imagination of you and your students. It may include written, oral, and art work; audio and video demonstrations; and evidence of projects. Perhaps the most appropriate advantage alternative assessments offer to standards-based instruction is that they encourage you to articulate your instructional goals clearly and publicly. They foster an alignment between your goals, your classroom, and your teaching and assessment strategies. Finally, they invite your students, as partners, into the process of teaching, learning, and reflecting.
McTighe (1996) notes that portfolios are not only extremely useful as a means of documenting student progress; they also provide a tangible way to display and celebrate student work (McTighe, 1996, p. 6). Schools can sponsor a "portfolio party" at which students present their portfolios to parents, fellow students, school administrators, other teachers, and invited guests, highlighting the progress they have made over the past year. In the Boulder Valley School District, students presented the results of their research on oceanography in the form of a Web page and a set of exhibits that were then displayed at the Denver Museum of Natural History. Not only does a portfolio document student progress throughout the year; it also gives feedback to you as a teacher to adjust your instructional strategies, it increases parent involvement as your students show off their accomplishments to their parents, and it gives your students the opportunity to take ownership of their learning.
In closing, there are two important points to remember. First, the ways in which your students can document and display their accomplishments are limited only by their own creativity and imagination. Second, learning, achievement, and performance are ongoing processes to be measured on a continuous basis, not just at the end of a unit, term, or school year.
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Manzo, K.K. (1997, October 8). Glimmer of history standards shows up in latest textbooks. Education Week 17 (6), 1, 11.
McTighe, J. (1996, December). What happens between assessments? Educational Leadership, 54 (4). Accessed October 27, 1997 from the World Wide Web: http://www.ascd.org/pubs/el/dec96/mctighe.html
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Nuttall, D.L. (1992, May). Performance assessment: The message from England. Educational Leadership, 54-57.
Popham, W.J. (1997, October). What's wrong--and what's right--with rubrics. Educational Leadership, 72-75.
Sherry, L., & Trigg, M. (1996, May-June). Epistemic forms and epistemic games. Educational Technology, 38-44.