George Gabriel
Coordinator of Academic Assessment

Performance assessment is an assessment method that requires students to perform a task rather than take a test.Performance assessment is designed to judge students' abilities to use specific knowledge and skills and actively demonstrate what they know rather than recognize or recall answers to questions.Performance assessment is sometimes called authentic assessment because it involves tasks in an authentic or real-life context or a context that simulates a real-life context.Authentic assessments are designed to engage the student in a simulation of a real-life problem that they must solve using the knowledge and skills they have gained in the course. A single project can be structured to assess both mastery of course content and attainment of program or major goals as well as certain general education goals such as communication skills, life-long learning skills, critical thinking skills, and social and education values.

Performance or authentic assessment is especially useful when it involves an ill-structuredor ill-defined problems, problems that do not have a clear-cut prescribed solution.Assessments designed around ill-defined problems require judgment, planning,the use of a variety of strategies, and the implementation ofpreviously learned skill repertories.

Grant Wiggins has suggested that an assessment can said to be authentic if

• it is realistic, replicating the ways in which a person's knowledge and abilities are "tested" in the real-world
• requires judgment and innovation by requiring the student to use knowledge and skills wisely and effectively to solve unstructured or ill-defined problems
• simulates contexts that mirror the workplace or other real-life contexts
• assesses the student's ability to efficiently and effectively use a repertoire of knowledge and skills to negotiate a complex task. (Wiggins, pp. 22 -24)

Rubrics

The criteria or standards for evaluating student learning in performance and authentic assessments may take the form of a rubric.A rubric is a set of scoring guidelines for evaluating students' work.Typically a rubric will consist a scale used to score students' work on a continuum of quality or mastery.Descriptors provide standards or criteria for judging the work and assigning it to a particular place on the continuum.Rubrics make explicit the standards by which a student's work is to be judged and the criteria on which that judgment is based.

Primary Trait Analysis

One approach to constructing rubrics is to use Primary Trait Analysis (PTA).PTA is assignment-specific in that the criteria are different for each assignment or test or performance.To develop a rubric using PTA the answers to several questions must first be formulated. (Huba and Freed, pp. 178-186)

1. What are the essential elements (criteria) that mark the work as high in quality?What would distinguish excellent work from poor work?

Performance assessments might include the following criteria. (Wiggins, p. 130)

Criteria	Description
Work quality and craftsmanship	The overall polish, organization, and rigor of the work
Adequacy of methods	The quality of the procedures used to produce the work
Degree of expertise	The relative sophistication, complexity, of maturity of the knowledge employed

2.How many levels of achievement do you want to specify?The following sets of terms specify a range of achievement ranging from excellent to unacceptable.

• sophisticated, competent, partly competent, not yet competent
• exemplary, proficient, marginal, unacceptable
• advanced, intermediate high, intermediate novice
• distinguished, proficient, intermediate, novice
• accomplished, average, developing, beginning

3.What is a clear description of performance at each achievement level?

The descriptors for each level should tell students what they need to do to attain that level.Avoid using undefined words such as "effective" or "excellent."Rubrics that suggest that higher levels ofwork have more of a quality than do lower levels of work are not particularly useful to the student.

Building a PTA scale can be constructed using the following steps. (Walvoord and Andersen, pp. 67 - 70)

1. Choose an assignment or activity to be used for assessing student performance and make clear the what the objectives of the assignment or activity are.
2. Identity the traits or criteria which will count in the assessment.
3. For each trait construct a two-five point scale describing the levels of mastery or dimensions of quality.
4. Try out the scale on a sample of student work or have a colleague review it. Revise as necessary.

Sample Rubric

Rubrics have been used extensively in assessing student writing.Many English faculty at the college use the following rubric for a evaluating a portfolio:

6.A portfolio that is excellent in quality

• is substantial in content and mature in style
• handles varied prose tasks successfully
• uses language effectively and creatively
• has a strong voice and clear sense of audience
• takes risks that work in content or form

5.A portfolio that is very good in overall quality

• is substantial in content and competent in style
• handles most prose tasks successfully
• uses language effectively and sometimes creatively
• demonstrates a clear and distinct, if not powerful, voice
• takes some risks

4. A portfolio that is good in overall quality

• is substantial in content and mature in style
• handles varied prose tasks successfully
• uses language effectively and creatively
• has a strong voice and clear sense of audience
• takes risks that work in content or form

4. A portfolio that is good in overall quality

• is competent both in content and style
• handles some prose tasks successfully
• uses language effectively
• has an uneven sense of voice and a somewhat formulaic sense of audience
• takes minimal risks

3. A portfolio that is fair in overall quality

• contains recurring problems in content and/or style
• handles few prose tasks successfully
• contains noticeable language problems
• lacks a clear sense of audience and voice

2. A portfolio that is below average in overall quality

• is thin in substance and undistinguished in style
• has difficulty with a variety of prose tasks
• contains recurring language problems that interfere with reading
• lacks a sense voice and a sense of audience

1.A portfolio that is unacceptable in quality

• contains severe weaknesses that render the content incomprehensible

More information about rubrics can be found on the following websites.

http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/nise/cl1/flag/

http://edweb.sdsu.edu/webquest/rubrics/weblessons.htm

http://www.siue.edu/~deder/assess/index.html/

http://school.discovery.com/schrockguide/assess.html

(Designed for K-12 education, but useful as a model and adaptable for higher education performance assessments)

Works Cited

Grant Wiggins, Educative Assessment: Designing Assessments to Inform and Improve Student
Performance (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1998).
Mary E. Huba and Jan E. Freed, Learner-Centered Assessment on College Campuses (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000).
Barbara E. Walvoord and Virginia Johnson Anderson, Effective Grading, (San Francisco:Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1998).

Note:These books may be checked out from the Resource Library in the Assessment Office.