Performance Based Assessments Take the Stage

Today on the Diane Rehm Show, Obama spokesperson Melody Barnes mentioned that if elected, Barack Obama would like to consider portfolios as a form of NCLB assessment. This news is both surprising and timely - yesterday the Forum for Education and Democracy held an event focusing on the benefits of performance based assessments (PBAs) in a standards-based and accountability-focused world.

Like portfolios, performance based assessments ask students to demonstrate their learning through open ended prompts, projects, presentations, and papers rather than in the multiple choice format commonly found in today's K-12 accountability system. A few states and localities like Rhode Island and the New York Performance Standards Consortium have implemented such systems with some success.

The educators and advocates advancing these assessments believe that they are a better indicator of 21^st Century Skills - problem solving, decision making, communication, teamwork, and self management - than those consisting primarily of multiple choice questions. While multiple choice questions test memorization and basic skills, PBAs have the potential to examine a student's ability to adapt knowledge to new contexts, think creatively, and initiate ideas.

In sum, PBAs can provide a more complete picture of a student's academic achievement than one score on a standardized multiple choice test. As one presenter suggested: "You wouldn't ask a doctor to give a diagnosis based on temperature alone."

Supporters cite similar testing systems in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Hong Kong as evidence of promise for PBAs in the United States. These countries score high on PISA tests in math and provide models for innovative applications of quality PBA programs. For example, some countries use the outcomes of PBAs as part of a school's accountability score (often more than 50 percent of the score), leaving room for basic assessments like multiple choice tests, to be used as well. In these systems, PBAs augment accountability and drive school improvement, while benefiting from high grader reliability.

It is also believed that PBAs encourage student engagement by including students in assessment formulation and allowing them to take ownership of their projects. Performance based assessments can also be sensitive to good teaching by freeing teachers from the confines of a test-centered curriculum and allowing them to innovate.

Of course, performance based assessments, like portfolios, have significant implications for the cost of accountability programs like NCLB. Performance based assessments are more costly and more time consuming to implement on a broad scale. They require good planning and preparation to ensure grader reliability, proper implementation, and alignment to standards.

Many states and districts claim that current testing regimes are too demanding. As a result, federal enforcement of a PBA system could be met with great resistance. But perhaps states are up to the challenge given the potential benefits to learning.

Regardless, it's difficult to imagine such a policy change without increased federal funding to support it. The federal government spent more than $408 million on state assessment development and implementation grants in 2008, averaging almost $8 million per state. We don't know how much a good PBA system would cost to get up and running and it's hard to predict what federal involvement in such a system would be. But asking states to develop whole new performance based assessment systems from scratch, even in an efficient consortium-style organization, would not be a simple undertaking.

However Barnes' comment plays out in the campaign and in a potential Obama administration, we are excited to hear that politicians are considering alternatives to status quo multiple choice assessments. The need to focus accountability and standards on real 21^st Century skills is more apparent than ever in today's economy.