PROCESS-ORIENTED PERFORMANCE-BASED ASSESSMENT

Imagine how students feel when they have few-or-no opportunity to explore learning, discover how they acquire learning to the most, try out different approaches to solving problems, work independently..determine the relevance of what they are learning to their lives. These are the words of McCombs and Miller (2007) in their book about the learner-centered approach. Imagine being in the shoes of the students. Most of us go into or wanted to be in teaching because we believe we can make a positive difference in young peoples lives. Teachers should not only know the subject matter they are teaching; but they also need to understand their students, how to maximize and accurately measure learning. The mentioned authors continued that real-life learning from the learners perspective is often playful, recursive and nonlinear, engaging, self-directed, and meaningful. Schools and teachers can help meet these needs and the time has come to address these learner needs while also addressing high standards of performance for all learners. There has recently been an explosion of interest in assessments that require students to do something, not simply know it or know how to do it. Students are required to show what they can do, not simply tell what they know or would do. These are the focuses of what was popularly known today in the field of assessment as performance-based. This type of assessment can provide other sources of information about the attainment of learning outcomes. Before discussing the focus of this chapter, it would be best to clarify terms that we will be encountering. 3.1 WHAT IS PERFORMANCE-BASED ASSESSMENT? A performance- based assessment is one in which the teacher observes and makes a judgment about the students demonstration of a skill or competency in creating a product. Performance-based is shorthand for performance-and-product based. The emphasis is on the students ability to use their knowledge and skills to produce their own work (J. Mcmillan: 1997).

Performance-based assessment provides a basis for teachers to evaluate both the effectiveness of the process or procedure used (e.g., approach to data collection, manipulation of instruments) and the product resulting from performance of a task (e.g., completed report of results, completed artwork). Unlike simple tests of factual knowledge, there is unlikely to be a single right or best answer. Rather, there may be multiple performances and problem solutions that would be judged to be excellent (Gronlund & Linn: 1995).

Meanwhile, Chatterji (2003) gave his argument regarding performance-based assessment as follows. For him performance-based assessments are better tools for describing the thought processes and metacognitive strategies used by a learner or the abilities with which learners reflect upon, evaluate, and monitor their own learning processes, as a necessary condition for learning and intellectual development. He also added that performance assessment is equivalent mainly with direct observation of behavior and refers to a wide array of nontraditional assessments with response formats that are alternatives to the highly structured written tests. The term performance-based assessment is synonymous with performance assessment. Performance assessments are also sometimes referred to as authentic assessments or alternative assessments. But the terms are not interchangeable. Alternative assessment highlights the contrast to traditional paper -and-pencil tests while authentic assessment emphasizes the practical application of the tasks in real world settings. Authors preferred the label performance-based assessment because it is more descriptive than alternative assessment and less pretentious than authentic assessment.

3.2 Characteristics of Performance-Based Assessments 1. Students perform, create, construct, produce or do something. 2. Reasoning skills are needed and assessed. 3. Involves sustained work, often days and weeks. 4. Calls upon students to explain, justify, and defend. 5. Performance is directly observable. 6. Involves engaging ideas of importance and substance. 7. Relies on trained assessors judgments for scoring. 8. Multiple criteria and standards are pre-specified and public. 9. There is no single correct answer. 10. If authentic, grounded in real-world contexts and constraints.

We have learned before that many educational tests measure learning indirectly because they ask questions, the responses to which indicate that something has been learned or mastered. Performance-based assessment, on the other hand, use direct measures of learning rather than indicators that simply suggest cognitive, affective, or psychomotor processes have taken place. As the students fulfill the tasks needed, their competence of the skills that need to be observed can be measured directly. But still, inspite of the many arguments authors are giving, just like any other forms of assessments there will be advantages and disadvantages in its use. 3.3 Advantages of Performance-based Assessments

1. Compared to a selected-response and short-answer items, performance-based assessment provides a more direct way to assess many complex instructional outcomes. 2. The approach can be used to improve instructional practice. 3. Students can be actively involved in the interaction of assessment and instruction. 4. Students and teachers are encouraged to move beyond the one and only one right answer mentality because multiple correct responses are possible as long as they meet the scoring criteria. 3.4 Disadvantages of Performance-based Assessments 1. Performance-based tests take more time to create and score. 2. It is an extremely cost-inefficient way to assess knowledge-and comprehensionlevel instructional outcomes. 3. Performance-based assessments, like essay items, suffer from notoriously low reliability for many of the same reasons. 4. It is difficult to incorporate all the conditions and elements relevant to real-life use, thus making the assessment less than authentic. 5. There may be little or no support or resources for performance-based assessment in the school or community. 3.5 Guidelines to Construct Well-Designed Performance-Based Assessments Because of the time and other resources consumed in producing and conducting performance-based assessments, it is significantly important that they should be well constructed. Gallagher (1998) gave the following steps in designing a performancebased assessment and we are going to use this for the initial phase of developing a process-oriented performance-based task since we will discuss fully the nature of task designing on the next chapter. 1. Determine the purpose of the assessment. 2. Determine what skills and outcomes the assessment will cover and specify in detail, including taxonomic domain and level. (This will compose the learning competencies). 3. Develop a task that is illustrative of and calls for the behavior specified in the outcomes. Record the task and write directions for the students. 4. Determine judging criteria. 5. Create the scoring scheme. 6. Review and revise the outcomes, the task design, the judging criteria, and the scoring scheme as necessary.

Performance-based can be assessments of processes, products or both (Borich & Kubiszyn:2000). In the meantime, we will concentrate first on the process-oriented performance-based assessment and on how we could make a complete design of it. 3.6 What is Process-Oriented Performance-Based Assessments? Process-oriented performance based assessments measure the ability of students to perform tasks that corresponds to important instructional objectives. In many areas, achievement is expressed specifically through students performance and then measuring the skills involved while it is ongoing and being observed. Examples include the ability to recite a poem, give a speech, manipulate laboratory equipment, work effectively in a group, sing, play a musical instrument, and perform various physical feats. Such activities do not result in a product that can be assessed, and shortanswer or fixed response tests are generally inadequate. Consequently, the process or procedures used in the performance itself must be judged and observed. Meanwhile, Chatterji (2003) labeled this type of assessment method as the behavior-based assessment. According to him, this method requires respondents to demonstrate behaviors or processes that must be directly observed. The distinctive feature of assessments in this category is that actual behaviors, performances, and demonstrations have to be assessed as they are occurring. Motor behaviors, on-the-job performance, and social skills are examples of attributes that lend themselves to measurement with behavior-based assessments. I have given to you previously the guidelines to construct a well-designed performance-based assessment and although the process may appear linear, actually it is not. It is an iterative process, with each step being influenced by preceding and following steps. Just the same, let us try to follow these guidelines to create a processoriented performance-based assessment. 3.6.1 Determining the Purpose The first step in designing a performance-based assessment is to determine the purpose for which the results will be used, because the purpose drives other decisions in subsequent steps in the process. For example, the results of the assessment may be used to describe a students best performance or to describe a students typical performance. It could also be used for formative or summative purposes. With this view in mind, you will create a more valid form of assessment, and you will also be less likely to create an assessment tool that does less or more than you need for. Meanwhile, Chatterji had suggested a more detailed way of designing a processoriented performance-based assessment which he called as the Process-Model which I found to be more useful. Phase I of his process model is the counterpart of Gallaghers determining the purpose. For him, phase 1 includes determining the construct, the population and the purposes for assessment. In the construct, you have to answer the

question what am I assessing?. Examples include, attitude toward school, science achievement, or classroom communication skills. In the population, it must answer the question, whom am I assessing? What are the students or the class defining characteristics? They could be a group of students in biology with limited English proficiency or a group of students with higher learning abilities. It is very useful to specify the characteristics of the group for a more accurate assessment. Then the purpose of assessment. How will the information resulting from the assessment tool be interpreted and used? What meanings are to be inferred from the results or scores, and in what contexts? Early specification of purposes is necessary to avoid invalid assessment uses and interpretations later on. Moreover, Chatterji in his book identified some of the specific purposes that can be used for classroom assessment as follows: 1. To identify student needs prior to beginning instruction. 2. To set instructional goals*. 3. To plan or improve instructional strategies.* 4. To place students in temporary instructional groups.* 5. To track student growth. 6. To communicate expectations to students, to motivate students. 7. To diagnose student strengths and weaknesses.* 8. To provide coaching and feedback to students.* 9. To provide a basis for grading/marking involving**: a. a criterion-referenced approach b. a norm-referenced approach c. a combination of the two 10. To communicate student progress to parents. 11. To make decisions on student retention or promotion.** 12. To generate data for teaching evaluation.*** 13. To generate data for teacher team/department planning.* 14. To generate data for program evaluayions (e.g., grade-level programs).*** *Formative decision **Summative decision ***Could be either formative or summative decision For example, to develop a graphing assessment, we would begin by specifying the assessment purposes, the population and the construct or attribute to be assessed.

1. Identify the assessment purpose

Example: To plan and improve instructional strategies. To provide coaching and feedback to students. Mainstream students in second year high school. Graphing skills.

2. Identify the target population or whom to assess. 3. Identify the construct or what to assess.

3.6.2 Determining Skills and Outcomes and their Taxonomy Level or the ProcessOriented Learning Competencies In this second step of the design process, the one who will do must determine the form and substance of the performance assessments. Clearly define instructional outcomes (objectives) are the backbone of good performance-based assessment, and it may incorporate one or a meaningful cluster of outcomes from one or more disciplines (Gallagher:1998). Learning competencies can be stated as instructional objectives, learning outcomes or learning targets to others. The types of objectives are essentially the same as those identified in Assessment 1. What is different is the nature of the task and the scoring criteria used to judge student answers. According to Santos (2007), the learning objectives in process-oriented performance-based assessments are stated in directly observable behaviors of the students. Competencies are defined as groups or clusters of skills and abilities needed for a particular task just like what Gallagher had stated. A competency is said to be more complex when it consists of two or more skills. Designers of performance-based assessment tasks usually ask the following questions to guide their initial selection of objectives as enumerated by Borich and Kubiszyn (2000): What kinds of essential tasks, achievements, or other valued competencies am I missing with paper and pencil tests? What accomplishments of those who practice my discipline (historians, writers, scientists, mathematicians) are valued but left unmeasured by conventional tests? Two categories of performance skills are typically identified from such questions: 1. Skills related to acquiring information, and 2. Skills related to organizing and using information.

The following are the skills or the learning competencies for acquiring, organizing and using information in the process-oriented performance-based assessments:

Skills in acquiring information

Skills in organizing and using information Organizing Classifying categorizing sorting ordering ranking arranging Problem Solving stating question identifying problems developing hypothesis interpreting assessing risks monitoring Decision Making weighing alternatives evaluating choosing supporting defending electing adopting

Communicating explaining modeling demonstrating graphing displaying writing advising programming proposing drawing Measuring counting calibrating rationing appraising weighing balancing guessing estimating forecasting Investigating gathering references interviewing using references experimenting hypothesizing

Examples of learning competencies for a process-oriented performance-based assessment are given below:

EXAMPLE 1: Learning targets focused on communication skills involve student performance of reading, writing, speaking, and listening. For reading, targets can be divided into process- what students do before, during and after reading- and outcome- what students get from reading. For example reading targets for elementary students progress from process skills such as being able to handle a book appropriately (e.g., right side up, turning pages) to word analysis skills (e.g., decoding, phonological awareness, and blending), to skills needed for comprehension and understanding (such as discrimination, contextual cues, inference, blending, sequencing, and identifying main ideas).

Assessment Purposes: To provide feedback that is necessary for interpretation of the students progress in communication skills. Target: For younger students, specifically those in the early grades. Construct: Word Analysis Skills General Objective: The activity aims to enable the student to progress from process skills, word analysis skills and the skills needed for comprehension and understanding. Specific Objectives: (Competencies) Given a list of words, the students will correctly: 1. name and match uppercase and lowercase letters; 2. recognize words by sight; 3. recognize sounds and symbols for consonants at the beginning and end of words; and 4. sounding out three-letter words.

For older students, specific targets may include the following: From the story Heidi by Edwards Allison, the students will: 1. state the main ideas accurately; 2. identify the setting, characters, and events in the story completely; 3. draw inferences from context; and 4. demonstrate reading speed with comprehension.

EXAMPLE 2: Now, let us try to arrange and put the necessary specifications to our example on graphing skills.

Assessment Purpose: To make a criterion-referenced interpretations of performance tied to summative decision-making. To provide feedback and coaching. Target: Mainstream second year high school students in general mathematics. Construct (Task): Constructing and interpreting line graphs 1.0 General Objective: Given a real data set, students will construct a line graph using complex procedural skills. Specific Objectives (Competencies): The students will: 1. Given a data-based problem situation, decide when it is appropriate to construct a line graph versus a bar or circle graph.

2. Select appropriate axes for variables given. 3. Based on ranges of values, identify reasonable scale units for variables. 4. Label graph, axes, scale units neatly. 5. Plot at least 10 X,Y coordinates accurately. 6. Connect plotted coordinates against accurately and neatly to depict data trend. 2.0 General Objective: Given a line graph, students will correctly interpret data trends. Specific Objectives (Competencies): The students will: 7. Describe changes in data points plotted by recognizing similarities and differences over time. 8. Use mathematical language to analyze trends such as higher, lower, hotter, cooler, change, etc.

You might notice that we have two general objectives in this example. The reason is not to make the task complex but rather to accomplish the specified construct. As it was given, the construct label is constructing and interpreting line graphs. Thus, the competencies to be expected consist of learning outcomes that emphasize the skills and knowledge relevant to line graphing, to construct and the other one to interpret.

The procedures and data needed for a complete process-oriented performancebased task will be discussed on the proceeding chapters about task designing and scoring rubrics. There, we will try to incorporate the information above that we established into the assessment specifications for designing or selecting a performance tool and complete the task design of the previous examples.

Purpose and objective are the foundation on which effective performance-based assessments tasks are built. They are the reasons for getting started in the first place. The general statement identified what is expected from the students and the specific objectives constitute the learning competencies.