Performance Assessment

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Permalink Reply by Wendy Brownell on July 15, 2010 at 6:43pm

The obstacles I have faced are time to assess every students' oral abilities, time to grade written assessments, and finding a way to gather meaningful data. The new push for data in our school district has made my colleagues lean toward traditional paper-pencil tests because they can gather data more quickly and efficiently. This year I am going to experiment with data gathering techniques with my performance assessments and hope to convince my colleagues that it is possible, and indeed necessary, to give performance assessments as well as gather the data we need.

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Permalink Reply by Barbara Hanna on July 20, 2010 at 11:07am

My burning issue is the teachers who think this is just another new fad and it will go away. We are going whole hog with performance assessments this fall and implementing it across levels and across languages. Had a great summer session with Peggy Boyles and a great curriculum team who worked extremely well together to get us started.

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Girald on September 30, 2010 at 8:58pm

Here in Madison, CT, we have been working on benchmark assessments for the past couple of years. Since ideally we would like to assess student proficiency in speaking, writing, listening, and reading/viewing skills, we have a time crunch. Our system is on a trimester schedule: three 60-day trimesters. Most courses, including all world language courses, meet an hour per day for only 2 of the three trimesters. We have a couple of issues:
1. If students do not meet expectations on a given benchmark, we are working on giving a second and even a third try later in the course. These subsequent assessments will be different since students will be working on more sophisticated skills.
2. Due to the time crunch, we have yet to complete all four benchmarks and follow-ups within a school year.
Nancy Girald

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