For over 30 years, the notion of authentic assessment in higher education has been adopted in academic practice, but it has managed to escape substantial critique. Although there have been multiple definitions and operationalisations of authentic assessment, current practice tends to foreground mimicking of work tasks. Authenticity cannot be…

Redundancy in assessment adds unnecessary time to degree completion, which also increases the cost of tuition. In addition, assessment practices that are overly burdensome for faculty can also place too much of a financial burden on an institution and, ultimately, the students. Therefore, competency-based education (CBE) institutions are wise to…

The educational technologies of the past quarter century--from teaching machines to minimal competency testing--all share the general purpose of helping educators make better, or more uniform, decisions. The currently favored technique for shaping local decisions is criterion-referenced testing. Some criterion-referenced testers first find out how…

Evaluating the impact of instructional innovations and coordinating instruction, assessment, and testing present complex tensions. Many evaluation and coordination efforts aim to address these tensions by using the coherence provided by modern cognitive science perspectives on domain-specific learning. This paper introduces an alternative…

Semester assessment of college wind band members is an issue that conductors would probably agree falls within their academic freedom. Institutions may award as little as no credit or even a percentage of a credit for ensemble participation, although the time and effort required of the students and their conductor is undoubtedly equivalent to, or…

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.

Addresses the challenge of finding or creating alternatives to tests and traditional grading systems. Reflects on and describes the experience of creating an assessment tool and cautions against choosing alternatives that merely camouflage the grades. Encourages educators to find authentic alternatives to describe children's growth. (BAC)

The inclusion of young children with disabilities has remained a function of the Head Start program since its inception in the 1960s when the United States Congress mandated that children with disabilities comprise 10% of the Head Start enrollment (Zigler & Styfco, 2000). Standardized, norm-referenced tests used to identify children with…

Identifies and analyzes seven threats to authentic evaluation, and predicts implications. Warns educators to beware of the term "standards"; norm-referencing; aggregation; credibility, comparability, and calibration; multiple measures; schemes that rule out varieties of excellence; and "untests." (SR)

Discusses shortcomings in both cognitive- and competency-based assessment approaches to art learning. Asserts that they fail on a number of fronts to reflect the full extent of art and how it operates. Questions the degree of accuracy that these assessment approaches can achieve when considering art education. (EV)

Noting that issues of assessing and evaluating learning and teaching have become a dominant concern in recent years, this book describes the journey of a group of classroom teachers, administrators, and researchers as they addressed the issues of evaluation and assessment. The book details the results of a collaborative project undertaken in…

A questionnaire to Ph.D. examiners across disciplines explored criteria appropriate for evaluating practice-based doctoral dissertations, in particular by collecting a core vocabulary of terms. Negative criteria included the lack of: intellectual grasp, coherence, engagement with the literature, originality, and generalizability, along with…

This paper examines the evaluation of student performance (SP) in schools in order to develop a set of strategies for creating more responsive systems for its evaluation, focusing on disadvantaged students. Problems involved in the evaluation of the performance of disadvantaged students are examined, including: evaluation purposes (direction,…

Argues that assessment must be authentic and occur in optimal contexts, and that such assessment should help teachers make instructional decisions. Describes the dramatically accelerated learning of a 10-year-old boy in a learning-handicapped classroom after his teacher worked intensively with the Optimal Learning Environment project and began to…

Performance-based assessment has the potential to support a richer curriculum and more accurately assess the skills of low-income minority students than standardized tests. Performance-based assessment has the following advantages: (1) it allows a wide range of expression; (2) it permits assessment of learning in a natural context while students…