ERIC Identifier: ED365312
Publication Date: 1993-12-00
Source: ERIC Clearinghouse on Information and
Technology Syracuse NY.
Alternative Assessment and Technology. ERIC Digest.
Considerable attention is now being paid to the reform of testing in this
country--going beyond multiple choice testing that emphasizes facts and small
procedures, to the development of methods for assessing complex knowledge and
performances. This is because goals for education have substantially changed
during the last decade, and because changes in assessment are believed to
directly influence changes in the classroom. Altering assessment practices is
likely to affect curriculum, teaching methods, and students' understanding of
the meaning of their work. A newly designed assessment system must accurately
measure and promote the complex thinking and learning goals that are known to be
critical to students' academic success and to their eventual sustained
achievement and contribution to their communities.
Two approaches that have shown considerable promise are performance-based
assessment and portfolio assessment. In these approaches, judgments about
students' achievement are based on their performances of complex tasks and
selections of work over time.
The success of a new approach to assessment carries with it a deep change in
how we think about the measurement of cognitive abilities. The view of
assessment carried over from the last century is that there are underlying
mental traits and that a test is a sample behavior which provides an imperfect
measure of the underlying characteristic the test was meant to measure. We are
attempting to develop a different paradigm of assessment. The new paradigm
requires methods like performance assessment or portfolio assessment. Instead of
giving a test that consists of a number of varied items believed to constitute a
sample of some underlying knowledge or skill, the new approach attempts to
record a complex performance that represents a rich array of a student's
abilities. Rather than a representative sample, it is meant to be a measure of
A key part of assessment research is developing tasks that will enable
students to use and demonstrate a broad range of abilities. Successful tasks
will be complex enough to engage students in real thinking and performances,
open-ended enough to encourage different approaches, but sufficiently
constrained to permit reliable scoring; they will allow for easy collection of
records, and they will exemplify "authentic" work in the disciplines.
THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY
How does technology figure in this
process of reconfiguring the way students are assessed? Technology has certain
unique capabilities that can make crucial contributions to the creation of
workable and meaningful forms of alternative assessment. Paper and pencil,
video, and computers can give three very different views of what students can
do. It's like three different camera angles on the complete picture of a
student. You can't reconstruct a total person from just one angle, but with
three different views you can triangulate, and discover a much richer portrait
of students' abilities.
Well-designed educational technologies can support these new approaches to
assessment, and consequently lend themselves to integration into curricula that
stress alternative assessment. Computers and video records offer expanded
potential for collecting--easily and permanently--different kinds of records of
students' work. For example, final products in a variety of media (text,
graphics, video, multimedia), students' oral presentations or explanations,
interviews that capture students' development and justifications for their work,
and in-progress traces of thinking and problem solving processes are now
collectible using video and computer technologies. Decisions about what records
to collect is a key part of the CTE research. Essential to success is
discovering what kind of records are most efficient for scoring yet capture the
most important aspects of the different target abilities.
An effort has been underway at the Center for Technology in Education (CTE)
to investigate two approaches to assessment; both are based on students' work on
complex tasks. They explore the potential that technology holds for facilitating
innovative assessment techniques by using videotape and computers. The remainder
of this digest describes some of the performance based alternative assessment
projects that CTE is working with in collaborative projects with a variety of
Performance assessment refers to the
process of evaluating a student's skills by asking the student to perform tasks
that require those skills. Performances in science might examine the ability to
design a device to perform a particular function or to mount an argument
supported by experimental evidence. In contrast, answering questions by
selecting from among several possible choices, as in multiple choice tests, is
not considered a performance, or at least not a performance that is of primary
interest to scientists or science educators.
If you ask scientists what qualities make a good scientist, they might come
up with a list like the following: the ability to explain ideas and procedures
in written and oral form, to formulate and test hypotheses, to work with
colleagues in a productive manner, to ask penetrating questions and make helpful
comments when you listen, to choose interesting problems to work on, to design
good experiments, and to have a deep understanding of theories and questions in
the field. Excellence in other school subjects, such as math, English, and
history require similar abilities.
The current testing system only taps a small part of what it means to know
and carry out work in science or math or English or history, and consequently it
drives the system to emphasize a small range of those abilities. In science, the
paper and pencil testing system has driven education to emphasize just two
abilities: recall of facts and concepts, and ability to solve short,
well-defined problems. These two abilities do not, in any sense, represent the
range of abilities required to be a good scientist.
With the help of collaborating teachers at partnership school sites, the
Center for Technology in Education has been conducting research studies to
develop and understand how technology (both video and computers) can best be
deployed in new assessment systems. In a study of this approach to assessment,
CTE collects sample performances, or records, for a specific set of tasks, and
design and test criteria for scoring those performances. Thus far, CTE has
experimented with a number of tasks in the development of technology-based
performance assessment records in high school science/mathematics. The tasks and
criteria for scoring them are described below.
COMPUTER SIMULATIONS. In one science project, CTE has collected data using a
computer program called Physics Explorer. Physics Explorer provides students
with a simulation environment in which there is a variety of different models,
each with a large set of associated variables that can be manipulated. Students
conduct experiments to determine how different variables affect each other
within a physical system. For example, one task duplicates Galileo's pendulum
experiments, where the problem is to figure out what variables affect the period
of motion. In a second task, the student must determine what variables affect
the friction acting on a body moving through a liquid. Printouts of students'
work can be collected and evaluated in terms of the following traits: (1) how
systematically they consider each possible independent variable, (2) whether
they systematically control other variables while they test a hypothesis, and
(3) whether they can formulate quantitative relationships between the
independent variables and the dependent variables.
ORAL PRESENTATIONS. This task asks students to present the results of their
work on projects to the teacher. These interviews include both a presentation
portion, where clarification questions are permitted, and a questioning period,
where the students are challenged to defend their beliefs. Students'
presentations can be judged in terms of: (1) depth of understanding, (2)
clarity, (3) coherence, (4) responsiveness to questions, and (5) monitoring of
their listeners' understanding.
PAIRED EXPLANATIONS. This tasks makes it possible to evaluate students'
ability to listen as well as to explain ideas. First, one student presents to
another student an explanation of a project he or she has completed or a concept
(e.g. gravity) he or she has been working on. Then the two students reverse
roles. The students use the blackboard or visual aids wherever appropriate. The
explainers can be evaluated using the same criteria as for oral presentations.
The listeners can be evaluated in terms of: (1) the quality of their questions,
(2) their ability to summarize what the explainer has said, (3) their
helpfulness in making the ideas clear, and (4) the appropriateness of their
PROGRESS INTERVIEWS. This is a task in which students are interviewed on
videotape about the stages of their project development and asked to reflect
upon the different facets of their project work. The task was developed as a
means for documenting the degree of progress students make in their
understanding of key concepts. Preliminary scoring criteria that have been
developed to evaluate these records are: (1) depth of understanding, (2) clarity
of explanations, (3) justification of decisions/degree of reflectiveness, (4)
use of good examples and explanations, (5) degree of progress made relative to
where the student started, and (6) understanding of the bigger picture of the
VIDEOTAPED DEMONSTRATIONS. CTE is collecting data on a task that has been
developed by a high school teacher in charge of a mechanical engineering program
for 11th and 12th graders at Brooklyn Technical High School. Working together on
design teams, students design and construct mechanical devices according to a
design brief that describes technical specifications. The students must
"demonstrate" their work and explain before a panel of judges from the field of
engineering how their devices work and why they made certain design decisions.
Students are then required to subject the devices to a functional test. For
example, one project required students to design a device which can lift and
lower "heavy" objects and place them at specified locations. The functional test
required students to demonstrate that the devices they constructed could
successfully lift and deliver three weights to a specified location in less than
The students' performances on this task are evaluated on two levels: the
quality of the oral presentation, and the quality of the device. The oral
presentation can be evaluated in terms of: (1) depth of understanding of the
principles and mechanisms, and (2) clarity and completeness of the presentation.
The device can be evaluated in terms of: (1) the economy of design (the degree
to which there was an economical use of materials); (2) craftsmanship (degree of
care in fabrication and assembly of device), (3) aesthetics, (4) creativity
(interesting or novel ways of accomplishing the design), and (5) controllability
(stability of the device).
These tasks provide interesting windows into students' abilities in the
physical sciences. To complete the picture of students' performances, however,
this evidence should become part of a larger portfolio of records of their work
on a project, such as written descriptions, analyses, and journals.
Bruder, Isabelle. (1993, Jan.).
Alternative assessment: Putting technology to the test. ELECTRONIC LEARNING,
12(4), 22-23, 26-28. EJ 457 876.
Clyde, Anne. (1992, Jan./Feb.). New technology, information access and
educational outcomes. EMERGENCY LIBRARIAN, 19(3), 8-14, 16-18. EJ 441 739.
Gray, Bob A. (1991). Using instructional technology with at-risk youth: A
primer. TECHTRENDS, 36(5), 61-63. EJ 441 780.
Magnussun, Kris, & Osborne, John. (1990, April). The rise of
competency-based education: A deconstructionist analysis. JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL
THOUGHT/REVUE DE LA PENSEE EDUCATIVE, 24(1), 5-13. EJ 407 351.
McClure, Robert M., & others. (1992, April). ALTERNATIVE FORMS OF STUDENT
ASSESSMENT. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational
Research Association, San Francisco, CA, April 20-24, 1992. 46pp. ED 347 209.
Seels, Barbara. (1993, Jan.). THE KNOWLEDGE BASE OF THE EVALUATION DOMAIN.
Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Educational
Communications and Technology, New Orleans, LA, January 13-17, 1993. 12pp. ED
Shavelson, Richard J., & others. (1991). Performance assessment in
science. APPLIED MEASUREMENT IN EDUCATION, 4(4), 347-62. EJ 446 660.
U.S. Congress. (1992, Feb.). TESTING IN AMERICAN SCHOOLS: ASKING THE RIGHT
QUESTIONS. [Full Report]. Washington, DC: Office of Technology Assessment. Rpt.
No. OTA-SET-519. ED 340 770. 314pp. (Also available from U.S. Government
Printing Office: S/N 052-003-01275-8.)
This digest was adapted from an article by Dorothy Bennett and Jan Hawkins
which appeared in News from the Center for Children and Technology and the
Center for Technology in Education, Vol. 1, No. 3, March 1992, Bank Street
College of Education, 610 West 112th St., New York, NY 10025. As of January
1994, the Center for Technology in Education will be affiliated with the
Education Development Center, 69 Morton St., New York, NY 10014.