Can Performance-Based Assessments Improve Urban Schooling?
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 make active use of a skill; (3) it assesses a wide range of competencies; (4) it requires students to demonstrate mastery in a personal and integrated way; and (5) it has “ecological validity,” because students perform as they will have to in life. The following types of performance-based assessments are described: (1) station activities, which require students to proceed through a series of discrete tasks, either individually or in teams, in a given amount of time; (2) domain projects, which require students to complete a set of exercises designed to explore an idea, concept, or practice central to a particular academic or artistic domain; (3)