Blog week August 6, 2010
I have been checking out offerings from the Forum for Education and Democracy Events page.
The Forum sponsors events ranging from Capitol Hill briefings to discussions of specific education issues. Many of them are outstanding. Of particular interest to me is the briefing on performance assessment that took place in 2008. (Click on the session about 3/4ths of the way down the page.) I wanted to go back and hear again the quality folks in education talking about performance assessment: Linda Darling-Hammond, Professor of Education at Stanford, Eva Baker of the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing (CRESST), and Ann Cook, principal of Urban Academy, a NY high school organized around performance assessment. Ann Cook said that student demonstrations of knowledge were not add-ons at schools like hers, but a priority. “It’s an approach that is deep, not broad,” she said. “The Consortium’s performance-based assessments are based on the notion that since learning is complex, assessment should be too.”
A young graduate of a performance assessment high school also spoke, Kiri Davis. Kiri said that in creating her highly acclaimed short film, “A Girl Like Me,”she combined learnings from several of her high school courses to create the film fulfilling the school’s arts performance graduation requirement. Kiri was honored by Media That Matters at their Festival for her film. It is worth your time to take a look at it.
The Forum provides an executive summary of the whole event on "Assessment for the 21st Century: Using Performance Assessments to Measure Student Learning More Effectively." Available here.
Also consider educational reformer and activist Deborah Meier’s assessment formula—four tasks with detailed rubrics and external evaluators.
- an analytic literary essay,
- a social studies research paper,
- an original science experiment, and
- the application of higher-level mathematics.
This is 4MAT. This is teaching for transfer, making learning real in students’ lives. What is so appealing to me in these these ideas and practices is the marvel of the presence of rigor and creativity together with students focusing on meaning-making.
