Cheating attracts a significant amount of attention in conversations about assessment, and with good reason: if students cheat, we cannot be sure they have met the learning outcomes of their course. In this conceptual article we question the attention given to cheating as a concept and argue that the broader concept of validity is a more important…

Following employers' criticisms and recent societal developments, policymakers and educators have called for students to develop a range of generic skills such as critical thinking ("twenty-first century skills"). So far, such skills have typically been assessed by student self-reports or with multiple-choice tests. An alternative…

This chapter discusses how to improve validity in SoTL studies through generating appropriate measures and using designs that examine causality between an activity and students' performance. [Part II available at EJ1029365.]

This commentary on the article titled "Examining the Internal Structure Evidence for the Performance Assessment for California Teachers: A Validation Study of the Elementary Literacy Teaching Event for Tier 1 Teacher Licensure" provides an overview of Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT), its relationship to edTPA and…

The purpose of this article is to describe and analyze the edTPA, a performance assessment created by the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) and administered by Pearson, Inc., to assess the professional readiness of student teachers. We challenge claims made in support of using this assessment, specifically within the…

Two tests intended to measure student achievement of the Common Core State Standards will face intense scrutiny, but the test makers say they will include performance assessments and other items that are not multiple-choice questions. Incorporating performance items on this tests will bring up issues over scoring, costs, and validity.

Standardized achievement tests that are used for assessment and accountability purposes may not provide reliable and valid outcomes for English language learners (ELLs) because extraneous sources may confound the outcome of assessments for these students. Performance assessments, by contrast, may offer opportunities for these students to present a…

One can not help but notice that the education community's professional fear-mongers focus heavily on PISA (Program of International Student Assessment) and rarely mention TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) or PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Study) in their discussion of the state of education in the United…

The recent "Nationwide academic achievement and study situation survey" was clearly influenced by the idea of "authentic assessment", an educational assessment perspective focused on "quality" and "engagement". However, when "performance assessment", the assessment method corresponding to this…

Authentic assessment is a growing alternative to conventional testing. This research-to-practice article describes a framework for implementing authentic assessment. The R-E-A-L framework shows how roles, equipment, assessment tools, and location can be incorporated into early childhood practices.

This handbook is designed as a quick reference for first-year teachers who find themselves in an assessment driven environment with little experience to help make sense of the language, underlying philosophy, or organizational structure of the assessment system. The handbook begins with advice on developing and evaluating effective learning…

This article describes the findings of studies conducted on a large-scale, classroom-based performance assessment of literacy for the early grades designed to provide information that is useful for reporting, as well as teaching. Technical studies found the assessment to be a promising instrument that is reliable and valid. Follow-up studies of…

Students generally do better on outcome-based performance tasks than on domain-specific tasks. Results on performance tasks must be interpreted in the context of instruction or guidance provided before or during their administration. Reliability is sometimes questionable, since teachers are highly influenced by students' overall academic…

Questions the claims by advocates of educational assessment reform, highlighting the work of Wiggins, who introduced authentic assessment. Discusses the origins of authentic tests, authenticity and validity, and assessment and educational philosophy, concluding that promotion of authentic assessment is flawed because "authentic" is misleading, and…

In England and Wales, a National Curriculum initiated in 1988 was designed to ensure that all schools provided a curriculum which represented different areas of knowledge. The past 20 years has increasingly seen more emphasis on the link between the financial amounts spent on education and subsequent return on this money. The impact of the…