Common Core Assessment
The Common Core State Standards Initiative represents one of the most significant reforms to our education system in recent memory. With 48 states, two territories, and the District of Columbia committing to the development of the Standards, our nation will have—for the first time—consensus on two essential issues necessary to significantly improving the college and career readiness of our nation’s students.
- First, the Common Core State Standards Initiative presents a common definition of the knowledge and skills necessary for students to be “ready for college and career.”
- Second, with this definition of college and career readiness in mind, the Common Core State Standards Initiative provides the most significant state-led effort to establish K–12 standards based on empirical evidence and research.
While these achievements are significant, numerous challenges still need to be addressed by schools as we incorporate the standards into daily practice. By emphasizing required achievements, the new Core Common Standards leave room for teachers, curriculum developers, and schools to determine how goals should be reached and what additional topics should be addressed. Thus, the Standards do not mandate such things as a particular writing process or the full range of meta-cognitive strategies that students may need to monitor and direct their thinking and learning. Teachers are thus free to provide students with whatever tools and knowledge their professional judgment and experience identify as most helpful for meeting the goals set out in the standards.
Thus the purpose of this website will be on how to create authentic task that use performance based assessments that enable teachers to evaluate students progress towards meeting the common core standards; and looking at how to construct these task into meaningful learning experiences while merging standards into real life experiences. To this end, this website is dedicated as a resource for teachers, instructional coaches and administrators as we prepare for implementation of performance based assessments in the near future.
Kansas Common Core Reference Links
Designing Methods of Assessment
A performance assessment can evaluate students who are demonstrating their skills by performing certain tasks, or it can evaluate products that students have produced to demonstrate their knowledge According to the CCSSO, “performance assessments are ways to measure students’ knowledge and skills that go beyond asking them to answer multiple-choice or fill-in-the-space questions. Typically, students are asked to complete a hands on task that can take 40 minutes or can be completed over several class periods. For example, students might be asked to research and write a magazine article or to conduct and explain the results of a scientific experiment.” Performance assessments can be activities such as science experiments and lab procedures, essays, speeches, computer programming, and so forth. Constructing performance assessment rubrics and applying these assessment strategies to the school program will enable students to demonstrate their basic skills through a real-world application.
Together, the assessment task and the scoring method comprise the performance assessment. (The performance assessment could consist of a single task and a scoring method, or it could consist of multiple tasks and one or multiple scoring methods.) Following Messick's (1992) conceptualization (and modifying it somewhat), performance assessments can be divided into two rough categories:
- Task-Centered performance assessments that are primarily intended to tap into and evaluate specific skills and competencies.
- Construct-Centered performance assessments that are intended to tap into and sample from a domain of skills and competencies.
Task-centered performance assessments tend to consist of tasks that allow little student control and specific scoring rubrics for judging student performance on the assessment tasks. On the other hand, construct-centered performance assessments consist of tasks that may allow a fair amount of student control; they often utilize a generic scoring rubric (or some other, non-specific criteria) for judging student performance.
The two types of assessments have different pedagogical uses and implications. For example, task-centered performance assessments may be easier to use and to score (because all scoring rubrics are specific), but they may not necessarily convey to students the principles behind the tasks. The reverse is true for construct-centered assessments. Construct-centered performance assessments may not be as easy to score, but, because the tasks are intended to sample skills and competencies within a given domain, and because the generic scoring rubric articulates the general skills and competencies of interest within the domain, they help to create common understandings among students and teachers of what is important to teach, learn, and assess.
It is predicted that Kansas will use the Construct-Centered performance assessment model as designers will try and tap into the Core Standard content domains that are directly associated with skill based competencies. To demonstrate how this will work the task developer would have to first determine the level of proficiency needed as it is associated with the Common Core Standards. This process can be accomplished by using the Content Analysis tool to draw directly from the core what skills will be needed to accomplish a performance-based task and then design the assessment around the Core Standards. This process will be further explained as we take the process through five distinct steps to arrive at the levels of performance required in the assessment.
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