Sometime students’ learning is not easily assessed by written responses. When the instructional objective are directed towards having students produce a product, follow a set of procedures, or perform a physical task, the most effective form of assessment involves observing and assessing the quality of their product, procedure, or performance.

Performance-based assessment thus requires students to apply learning by performing a physical task or producing concrete products that are observed and assessed. These tasks can also take the form of interviews, oral presentations, demonstrations, computer simulations, or portfolio presentations.

Performance-based Assessment asks students to express their learning and knowledge through practical demonstration or action.

With conventional testing approaches, assessment is usually the first priority and instructional value is considered secondary. Performance tests fall somewhere in between, serving both roles.

Lab experiments - being able to perform successfully certain specified processes or experiments

Dramatization - enacting various concepts, stages of a process, or events

Invention projects - creating various kinds of products with the hands to show understanding and application of learning.

Skill demonstration - demonstrating understanding of a topic through proficient execution of related activities.

Investigations.

Investigations can allow the lecturer to assess students’ understanding of and ability to apply concepts, design investigations and solve problems.

Suggestions for Constructing Better Performance Tests

When you design performance assessment tests you should examine the following suggestions for writing better performance items with the understanding that adjustments and compromises will have to be made to accommodate the specific purposes of their assessment.

The construction of a performance test should begin with a purpose.

Selecting appropriate tasks.

The task should measure the skills want students to acquire.

Include criteria for judging performance and make sure that students are aware of how they are being evaluated or assessed.

Performance tests need to be fair for all students taking the test.

Should you assess process or product?

In the past, it has been the final product of performance tasks that have been the focus of evaluation rather than the process. This is because products are easier to compare. A teacher is likely to be more interested in the short story a student has written than the processes used for its composition. However, this view is changing. Students should not be on their own when they write. The process becomes just as important as the product.

Tasks that have Process as Their Main Focus

Sometimes instruction focuses more on the process that the product. Consider a group project in a Human and Social Sciences class. One important purpose of this lesson might be to teach students how to work together. Even though a superior student can dominate the group and by himself or herself produce a product better than other groups, this product may not be a sufficient indicator of success. The group process might be of equal, or even greater importance.

Assessing processes

Since processes are usually made up of a series of required behaviours, they cannot easily be evaluated globally. Instead, the focus of evaluation should be on each separate behaviour. Processes are evaluated either with checklists or rating scales.

The implementation of checklists requires a listing of statements that includes all of the required characteristics of how a process is constructed. The observer places a mark next to each statement to indicate that the behaviour is present. Rating scales require judges to indicate how often student behaviour has occurred or evaluated the quality of the student behaviour using the rating scale.

The evaluations required for rating scales are more time-consuming than those associated with checklists. Their use can limit the number of characteristics that can be evaluated.

Tasks that have Products as Their Main Focus

The products of performance assessments can be evaluated globally or their components can be evaluated separately.

One aspect of performance assessment that makes them difficult to evaluate is their emphasis on originality and creativity. It is difficult to make accurate distinctions among student responses that are intended to vary across many dimensions because any two performances can differ in a myriad of different ways. Each may be superior in some aspects while lower quality in others.

Consider a project, on which a teacher is supposed to consider originality, social contribution, neatness, creativity, extensiveness and quality of narrative explanations, the use of references and so forth. How do you compare a student response that is innovative, unusual, yet poorly presented with a less creative one, which is neat, carefully worded, and meticulously documented? A set of rules that standardize the evaluation of the tasks and specify what qualities are to be considered important can sometimes help. This can make it possible to limit the number of dimensions along which comparisons must be made.

Use of Multiple Assessors or Observers