Public performances are a fact of life for students involved in music and sports. Piano students play in recitals and young athletes perform gymnastics routines, for example, putting newly acquired skills to the test. Few schools, however, require students to demonstrate before an audience what they've learned in the academic realm.
Asking students "to demonstrate that they actually know what the school set out to teach them" is considered "a radical idea," says Joe McDonald, director of research at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, and coauthor of the ASCD book Graduation by Exhibition: Assessing Genuine Achievement. Yet schools that require student exhibitions find they are a valuable assessment tool and motivate students to make a good showing, experts say.
A complex form of performance assessment, student exhibitions call on students "to present the fruits of their work," says Grant Wiggins, president of the Center on Learning, Assessment, and School Structure (CLASS) in Princeton, N.J. Exhibitions are usually composed of numerous performance requirements, which are "stretched out over time," he notes. These are typically multimedia in nature: students may have to write a paper, make an oral presentation, build a model or create computer graphics, and respond spontaneously to questions. Often, exhibitions are a "culminating" performance. The audience for exhibitions may include teachers, classmates, younger students, parents, or other community members.
In South Brunswick, N.J., for example, 6th graders must pose a research question and then answer it in writing, orally, and visually, explains Willa Spicer, the district's director of instruction. Students' exhibitions have dealt with topics as wide-ranging as comedy in America, the development of movie technology, and the women's suffrage movement. Such demanding research projects reveal far more about students' learning than fill-in-the-blank tests. "Teachers are beginning to realize they get much better [assessment] information when they look at complex behavior," Spicer says.
Student exhibitions allow educators to bring assessment in line with higher-order curriculum objectives, says Ted Chittenden, a research psychologist with the Educational Testing Service (ETS), who has studied exhibitions. "If, in your social studies curriculum, you value students' conducting individual work and being able to talk about it, you're not going to measure that [capability] with the Iowa test of geography," he notes. Wiggins agrees. "Conventional testing doesn't require students to bring their work to a realistic, authentic, performance-based result," as exhibitions do, he points out.
Another benefit of student exhibitions is their effect on students' level of interest and effort. Exhibitions motivate students, says McDonald, because they give students "more pride of ownership, and a clearer sense of what the school wants."
"A real project, with a real deadline, for a real audience, serves as a powerful motivator," says Lynn Murray, principal of Williston Central School in Williston, Vt. Students at Williston take six- to eight-week multidisciplinary units, which culminate in a fair-like exhibition. "We try to move the culminating activity into a real purpose, beyond doing something for a grade—with an audience that's real, not just the teacher," Murray says. Students at the school have produced newscasts used at town meetings, for example.
One student, after taking a course that gave a basic overview of the human body, created a multimedia project on eating disorders, which featured two life stories based on interviews, says Al Myers, who teaches at Williston. The student presented the project to 85 of her peers.
Preparing students to shine during such exhibitions requires teachers to spend as much time teaching research and analytical skills as they do teaching content, Myers says. Teachers must also adopt a strong coaching role. Myers helps students find resources, asks them leading questions, and keeps them focused on the standards they'll be judged by. "The clearer you can be about the standards—for both content and quality—the more the students will have the tools" to do well, Murray says.
"It's important to be clear and up-front about the standards," agrees Monte Moses, associate superintendent of the Cherry Creek School District in Englewood, Colo., who pioneered student exhibitions as an elementary principal. Students must see exemplars of excellent—and lower-rated—work, he advises, and teachers must explain what distinguishes them. When given this grounding, "kids understand levels of performance perfectly," Moses says. "Once that's in place, you don't compromise on feedback."
Rating Exhibitions
Evaluation of student exhibitions must be credible, Wiggins emphasizes. Raters should be disinterested, and they should rate student performance against set criteria. "If the teacher is coach, judge, jury, and cheerleader, it's not credible," he says.
In South Brunswick, N.J., the 6th grade exhibitions are not rated by anyone from the students' own schools, Spicer says. Raters may be parents, business people, student teachers, state department employees, or ETS researchers. These outside raters are trained in the morning to serve as assessors in the afternoon, she says.
Typically, rubrics are used to rate student exhibitions. However, rubrics alone are not sufficient, Wiggins cautions. Also needed are performance standards that are "validated" by links to real-world standards. Standards for writing could be tied to anchor papers from a state writing assessment, for example, while standards for presentation skills could be tied to videotapes of Peter Jennings. Basing performance standards on "the habits of the local teachers" is not good enough, Wiggins asserts.
When rubrics aren't tied to exemplars, they can demotivate students, others warn. "If students simply see that each major project has a new rubric, it can feel like the new hoop to jump through," rather than a clear delineation of standards and expectations, says Sherry King, superintendent of schools in Mamaroneck, N.Y., whose former district, Croton-Harmon, N.Y., has a five-year history with student exhibitions. King recommends maintaining a "catalogue of exemplars," so that rubrics are grounded in student work, not just embodied in adult language. Good exemplars inspire students to emulation.
Experts emphasize that educators planning for student exhibitions must keep the purpose of the assessment foremost in mind. Exhibitions are "great" for assessing students' inquiry skills and depth of understanding, but "lousy for assessing breadth of subject-area expertise," Wiggins observes. Using exhibitions to test for low-level skills would be "silly," Spicer adds. Educators need to ask, "What's important enough to assess for kids to do this elaborate work?" she recommends.
Elements of an Exhibition
The prompt, or what students are asked to do. The "classic" exhibition asks students to write a research report and make an oral presentation. But there are many possibilities, McDonald says, and teachers should be "broadminded" about the kinds of prompts they give. Student exhibitions can involve portfolios and seminars, for example.
A vision of what adults hope students will do. This should be a collective vision that both educators and community members can endorse.
Agreement about standards. Educators must decide what level of performance is "good enough" and what the signs of that level of quality are. Rubrics are usually developed to address these questions.
Student work is out in the open, exhibited, and part of the dynamic of the school. "When students see benchmarks all around them, it keeps the rubrics alive," McDonald says. The public should also be an audience.
A coaching context. Teachers should coach students toward excelling in their performances. An emphasis on coaching can transform a school from the transmission-of-knowledge model to the student-as-worker model, McDonald maintains.
Reflection on the results of exhibitions, to adjust the system. For example, did girls do better than boys? If so, what does that mean? Reflection on such findings can be "a powerful lever for change," McDonald says.
