Education Commons^™

Performance-Based Assessment: Questions And Answers, John T. Seyfarth

MERC Publications

A number of states, schools and school districts are engaged in efforts to develop and implement new forms of assessment. These efforts are known by several names. Performance assessment, the term used in this paper, refers to tasks that require students to construct responses or take actions to demonstrate specified knowledge or skills. Performance assessment tasks appear in a variety of formats ranging from open-ended questions to demonstrations of skills or comprehensive collections of bodies of work over time. The tasks focus on higher order skills are non-routine and are sometimes loosely structured. Students may be called upon to make, …