When parents objected to a new performance-based achievement scale, a Wisconsin school revised its report card to reflect traditional letter grades for each main subject area, using the new scale to measure component skill areas. Schools can weather controversy by making report cards reflect school philosophy, involving school personnel and…

A teacher educator describes how presentations of portfolios by students and evaluation of the portfolios by classroom peers replaced the usual final exam in a foundations of education course. A learning experience in itself, the portfolio presentations allowed students to reflect on their own learning and to demonstrate it using their own…

Narrates how the Hupobi Heritage Project involved Pueblo Indian youth in the interpretation of their cultural heritage for non-Native Americans. Explains how the information was presented through multimedia. (HB)

A study of a medical student clinical assessment program since 1986 at the University of Massachusetts indicates student awareness of increased faculty observation and increased feedback to students during and following clinical rotations. Results indicate a conscious faculty effort to improve students' clinical skills by improved observation and…

Notes that the curriculum standards under development by the National Council for the Social Studies incorporate authentic learning assessment tasks and suggest ways that civic participation experiences can be included and the subsequent learning assessed. Discusses instruction and assessment opportunities involving citizenship education. (RS)

In 1990, the California Assessment Collaborative was created to support development and implementation of teacher-designed performance assessments. Four key practices help ensure that assessment serves instruction: articulating standards and assessment design; building teacher capacity for using assessment to improve instruction; building student…

Students find performance-based assessment exciting because the tasks are intriguing and mirror real-life experiences. As this vignette of a middle school interdisciplinary coastal ecology unit shows, hands-on, teacher-made assessments can effectively evaluate students' mastery of process skills such as observing, classifying, inferring,…

Describes an assessment tool called the 4P's (pretest, posttest, portfolio, and performance) designed to assess hands-on science. (ZWH)

Describes the Project on Scope, Sequence, and Coordination of Secondary School Science (SS&C). Discusses the design of a reform in science education, the use of student metaphors and analogies in explaining phenomena, student motivation, and student performance-based assessment in the SS&C project. (MDH)

Examines what is measured by current testing instruments and details the components of a comprehensive assessment system that includes testing and alternative, authentic measures as the basis for judgments about student progress. Types of tests include norm-referenced, criterion-referenced, and performance-based assessments. The more accurate the…

The essential idea of alternative assessment modes is for students to create some product and reflect on it. The authenticity of tasks means using regular classroom instruction as an opportunity for student assessment. Reflective self-evaluation should be an integral part of every classroom assignment, not an obligatory afterthought. Developing…

The five chapters of this report provide resources that deal with the validity, generalizability, comparability, performance standards, and fairness, equity, and bias of performance assessments. The book is written for experienced educational measurement practitioners, although an extensive familiarity with performance assessment is not required.…

Studies of portfolio construction and compilation involving 35 Israeli principals and 14 Dutch managers show that high-quality portfolios can only be expected after sustained use, but that the use of portfolios has an immediate impact on views toward assessment. Portfolios are time-consuming, but can provide effective feedback to the learner. (SLD)

Growing frustration with assessment practices in adapted physical education and confusion with more traditional grading has led to a call for authentic assessment, which measures students' performances in more natural, real-world settings. Within authentic assessment, rubrics provide detailed guidelines for making scoring decisions, offering…

Describes an authentic assessment framework for music educators by summarizing a collaborative project between a music-education professor and a general music teacher at DeWitt Middle School in Ithaca, New York. States that the project shows how an interactive, process-oriented approach to assessing musical understanding is both possible and…