Linking assessments to standards "is not as simple as it sounds," Lauren Resnick said in her closing keynote address. Resnick is cofounder and director of the New Standards Project, a consortium of states and school districts using shared performance standards and examinations.
"There's much, much more to getting a standards-referenced exam than just making up some tasks," Resnick said. "The first thing you have to do is create tasks explicitly designed to test the knowledge and skills that are in the standards. That turns out to be a new art form, and not one that anyone has been cultivating."
In addition, "you have to learn how to get rid of the tricks that are traditionally built into assessments" to spread out the scores, such as "making the task a little harder by hiding the real thing you want kids to attend to," she said. "In writing standards-referenced tasks, you have to be able to make it very clear to kids what you're after, and yet still leave them a lot of work to do."
"In the end, the validity of these tasks is that they will be sensitive to good instruction," Resnick said. "Kids in programs that are teaching to the standards will do better [on the assessment tasks]. They're not surrogate I.Q. tests."
When we think about equity issues in performance assessment, cultural and social factors—such as language, socioeconomic status, gender, and race and ethnicity—leap to mind, noted Warren Simmons, executive director of the Philadelphia Education Fund. As important as these factors are, however, we should not overlook several others, he argued. "We often overlook the nature of the assessment tasks, the nature of the standards, and the issue of 'opportunity to learn' as factors that [affect] performance." Because these factors are distributed unevenly, they "create equity considerations that are important."
"As we begin to move to performance assessments," Simmons said, "one of the important questions we have to ask ourselves when we look at the outcomes is, 'Is this a product of what the student knows and can do, or is this a product of the mismatch between the curriculum of the classroom and school that student attends and the curriculum of the assessment?'" Instruction in many school districts, especially in urban areas, "is still very lesson-driven and teacher-centered," Simmons said. This kind of instruction sets students up for failure on assessments that are "based on higher-order reasoning and problem solving and rich, complex knowledge."
Educators today know more about how children learn than ever before and, as a result, understand the need to let students show what they know in a variety of ways, said Beth Swartz, coauthor of Multiple Assessments for Multiple Intelligences. The theory of multiple intelligences, she explained, suggests that all human beings have at least seven distinct intelligences, and teachers who embrace this theory use assessments that allow students to exercise several of their intelligence areas. Therefore, a student asked to write an essay describing the main character in a favorite novel might also be required to create an illustration showing how the character is central to the book.
Still, Swartz cautioned, teachers must remember that their students will live and work in a culture that values the logical-mathematical and linguistic intelligences above all others. "If I think that Mary is a really strong bodily-kinesthetic (BK) learner and if I have her doing only BK activities for assessment, then I'm not developing her other intelligences and, worse than that, I'm not developing the two intelligences that our society honors," Swartz said. "I can use Mary's BK strengths to help her better understand, but at some point she's going to have to transfer that [knowledge] to the verbal-linguistic or logical-mathematical intelligences—or I'm not serving her well."
"The ideas of performance-based education are far more important than the vocabulary we use" to talk about it, Tom Guskey, professor of education at the University of Kentucky, told his audience. The lengthy vocabulary list includes terms such as goals, objectives, outcomes, standards, competencies, proficiencies, and expectations, among others. "People are arguing with passion about the differences between these words, and it has become a tangled thicket of terminology," Guskey said. "Unfortunately, it is also distracting us from the important work we have to do."
"I spent a very depressing day earlier this year in a school district, working with a group of very caring, thoughtful educators," he related. "They sat in a room arguing the entire day about whether the things they were talking about were actually goals or objectives."
"It doesn't matter what you call it," Guskey emphasized. "Be clear about what you want students to learn, and be clear about the kind of evidence you would accept to verify their learning. That's what's important."