Lists 10 conditions essential to a school's readiness to explore alternative assessment methods, including desire for better assessment information, insufficiency of current assessment method, staff and parent openness to innovation, conceptual clarity, assessment "literacy," clarity about desired student outcomes, unsuitability of present…

Assessment reforms might fail because high stakes will be attached to them too soon, judgments will be unreliable, and lawsuits will occur. Educators need to consider technical issues including score reliability, task validity, portfolio sampling, and generalizability problems. U.S. schools would improve considerably if national Advanced Placement…

Accountability systems are designed to heighten probability of student exposure to good instructional practice, reduce the likelihood of harmful practices, and provide internal self-correctives. The Chapter 1 accountability system fails to meet these objectives, as it lacks timely self-correction information, credible tests, and linkages among…

Describes a teacher's journey toward creating authentic assessment and how it matches the instruction in her classroom. Suggests that the process of documenting the students' stories about learning and reflecting upon them has the potential to solve some of the difficulties with testing, evaluation, and assessment. (RS)

Describes a performance assessment which accompanies an integrated curriculum for the third and fifth grades in two schools and is designed to reflect a wide spectrum of literacy processes that appear in an integrated curriculum. Follows two third-grade students as they perform each of the tasks. (SR)

Provides information useful to educators who are rethinking their current approach to assessment and identifies characteristics of each assessment that seem particularly noteworthy. Concludes by raising a number of questions that should be considered before deciding whether or not to use these new performance-based assessments. (MG)

This article discusses implications of educational reform movements for improving the educational well-being of gifted students, in general, and gifted African-American students, in particular. Recommendations for educational improvements are offered in the areas of performance assessment, primary preschool programs, extended school services,…

Describes the development of an authentic assessment model identifying 14 complex thinking processes. Two teachers designed a task allowing high school students to demonstrate their biotechnological knowledge and simultaneously deploy a complex thinking process (decision making). This model required students to synthesize and integrate what they…

Given a Masters partial credit item with n known step difficulties, conditions are stated for the existence of a set of (locally) independent Rasch binary items such that their raw score and the partial credit raw score have identical probability density functions. (Author/SLD)

Examines the trend toward outcome-based assessment that demonstrates what children have really learned by evaluating what they can do in actual or simulated applied situations. Discusses theories of performance assessment, the qualities of good authentic performance assessment, and ways of integrating authentic assessment with traditional…

This book is a collection of nine commissioned papers that consider the educational reform represented by performance assessments, their advantages and disadvantages, and the challenges of successful implementation. Both theoretical and practical issues are addressed. (SLD)

Investigated item-by-item, holistic, and "trait" scoring with three mathematics performance-based tasks completed by 53 to 79 junior high and senior high school students per task. Results suggest that holistic scoring and item-by-item scoring methods provide similar information, but that trait score tapped into different aspects of…

Describes the implementation plans, experience, and results of incorporating performance measurement into the accreditation process of the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. Traces the evolution of standardized core measures known to be valid and reliable, noting political and technical problems in measure…

Describes a pilot project in the state of Alaska and one mathematics teacher's experiences in this project studying and using performance-based assessment techniques and developing a scoring guide for performance-based assessments. (ASK)

Studied two schools that adopted the Authentic Teaching, Learning, and Assessment for All Students (ATLAS) school-reform design, focusing on the link between school management and instructional change. These case studies support the usefulness of the ATLAS model and show that instruction and management must work together for successful reform.…