Alternative Assessment Primer

The details of alternative assessment are often reviewed when pre-service teachers take assessment courses. After that, however, it is up to the individual, the school, and the district to decide whether or not to use it in the classroom.

What Is Alternative Assessment?
The term alternative assessment is broadly defined as any assessment method that is an alternative to traditional paper-and-pencil tests. Alternative assessment requires students to demonstrate the skills and knowledge that cannot be assessed using a timed multiple-choice or true-false test. It seeks to reveal students' critical-thinking and evaluation skills by asking students to complete open-ended tasks that often take more than one class period to complete. While fact-based knowledge is still a component of the learning that is assessed, its measurement is not the sole purpose of the assessment.

Alternative assessment is almost always teacher-created and is inextricably tied to the curriculum studied in class. The form of assessment is usually customized to the students and to the subject matter itself.

What does Alternative Assessment look like?
Alternative assessment takes many different forms, according to the nature of the skills and knowledge being assessed. Students are usually asked to demonstrate learning by creating a product, such as an exhibition or oral presentation, or performing a skill, such as conducting an experiment or demonstration.

Three variations of alternative assessment are performance-based assessment, authentic assessment, and portfolio assessment. In any given situation, more than one form may be involved. A brief description of each follows.

Performance-based Assessment
This terms refers to the range of assessment activities that give the teacher the opportunity to observe students completing tasks using the skills being assessed. For example, in a science class, rather than take a multiple-choice test about scientific experiments, students actually conduct a lab experiment and write about their process and choices in a lab report.

Authentic Assessment
This approach attempts to connect assessment with the real world. It requires students to apply skills and knowledge to the creation of a product or performance that applies to situations outside the school environment. Biology teachers may assess students' understanding of the scientific process and collaboration by having students take part in an annual Audubon Society collection and analysis of local songbird populations.

Portfolio Assessment
Portfolios usually are comprised of work that has been completed over an entire grading period or semester. Teachers using portfolios require students to review their work and select items that best demonstrate that learning objectives have been met. Often students also write an essay reflecting on what they have learned, including the processes they have used to meet their goals. Portfolios can be paper-based, computer-based, or a combination of both. Ultimately, they should be judged against a predetermined set of criteria and will provide evidence of the learning that has occurred over time.

How Does It Differ from Traditional Assessment?
In each of these types of assessments, sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference between study and assessment. This is a hallmark of alternative assessment. Part of the purpose is to make assessment a more meaningful learning experience. However, ascertaining mastery of a skill or subject is still the key objective of assessment.

Teachers usually grade products and performances using a scoring rubric. The rubric consists of a set of detailed standards and explicit criteria to which the performance or product will be compared. Students are provided the scoring criteria at the onset of instruction and sometimes will even have input into how they will demonstrate their proficiency.

Why Use Alternative Assessment?
Many people attribute the move toward alternative assessment to changes that have occurred in the workplace. In the past, public schools prepared students for manufacturing jobs that were the backbone of the economy. Schools focused on base skill sets and fact-based knowledge. Paper-and-pencil tests adequately measured the fact-based knowledge used in the old economy.

As the country has moved from manufacturing to an information-based economy, some economists have predicted that the new workplace will increasingly demand workers with analytical thinking skills. Workers will need to use higher-level thinking skills to solve complex problems of information management and computing. Alternative assessments help schools prepare students for the complex tasks that will be required of them when they become adults by focusing on thinking skills rather than memorization.

Read More About It

The Coalition of Essential Schools http://www.essentialschools.org/cs/resources/query/q/1017?x-r=runnew
This grassroots organization is a school reform network of nearly 1,000 schools and 24 regional centers around the country. It actively advocates the use of alternative assessment and has a number of resources online to help teachers implement and understand the process.

National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing (CRESST)
http://www.cse.ucla.edu/
Funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, CRESST conducts research on important topics related to K-12 educational testing. They maintain a robust web site with considerable resources, including those on alternative assessment.

Eisenhower Center for Mathematics and Science Education (ENC)
http://www.enc.org/topics/assessment/altern/
Read a variety of math and science teachers' personal experiences with alternative assessment. ENC is a federally funded organization whose mission is to identify effective curriculum resources, create high-quality professional development materials, and disseminate useful information and products to improve K-12 mathematics and science teaching and learning.

Project Zero's Research into Portfolios
http://pzweb.harvard.edu/Research/APPLE.htm
This site provides a short description of an alternative assessment project conducted by Multiple Intelligence theorist Howard Gardner and Joseph Walters for the Harvard Graduate School of Education.