Performance Assessments are used in traditional, face-to-face settings as well as online settings. They are a valuable tool in either setting, but have specific applications, advantages, and limitations in each. I will define and discuss them and their advantages and limitations in online education.
According to Oosterhof, Conrad, & Ely (2008), performance assessments involve students with performing a task, which involves several steps and requires specific skills, usually in order to create a product. They are used in skills based and educationally based classes as well as on the job training and evaluation. They are not a multiple choice, true/false, fill-in-the blank type of test. However, a performance assessment can be a written document if the course objectives require it. For example, in order to determine if a student has internalized and can use/apply grammar rules, a teacher might observe actual writings from the student. A performance assessment must be designed to measure an explicit objective or goal from the course. In other words, the task or product of the performance objective must themselves be course objectives or goals.
Performance assessments can be graded by looking at the process the student goes through to complete the assessment or they can be graded by examining a final product. Often, the process is simulated-especially when it is too expensive or dangerous to have the student perform the task in reality. For example, simulations are often used in a military training facility to prepare soldiers for a mission/battle. Sometimes, however, the performance assessment does involve having the student actually perform a task and/or create a product. The instructor will observe and judge either the process of creating the product or the product itself, but not usually both. For example, in a cake baking class, a student’s final might be to bake a cake and the instructor would sample the cake and judge it (the final product) based on the qualities of a good cake in order to determine if the student has met the objective of the class (baking a cake). Of course this is a very simple example, from a skills based class instead of an educational class. However, performance assessments can be used in every type of educational class as well.
The instructor/observer has two choices about how to structure the assessment. He/she can either prompt the student to do specific steps/tasks in the process or they can simply observe without prompting. The specific situation being observed will usually dictate this decision. For example, if a company is hiring someone to work in a customer call center, they may want to observe the person helping a customer on the phone without prompting them to find out if the person has the right skills necessary for the job. However, this will make it difficult to determine the range of skills the person has because not every situation can be covered in one to a few calls. According to Oosterhof, Conrad, & Ely (2008), prompting students tends to bring out maximum performance whereas not prompting them will produce a student’s typical performance. Because of this, when a supervisor or instructor wants to observe personality traits, work habits, and a willingness to follow prescribed procedures, he/she should not prompt the worker/student. However, prompting is needed if he/she wants to see how well a student can explain a concept orally, write a paper, or play a musical instrument.
Since performance assessments involve students actually doing something, they are able to determine well a student’s skill at activities like playing a musical instrument, sports performance, creating and conducting an experiment in a science lab, or creating works of art. Written tests would not be able to accomplish this. However, due to space and time separation in asynchronous, online settings, performance assessments can’t be used online to measure these types of skills. Therefore, online education is limited to what types of classes/skills can be taught online as well as what types of skills can be assessed online.
Due to the space and time separation with asynchronous, online courses, observing the process versus the product is also very limited or impossible. In other words, online instructors are not able to create performance assessments that directly observe and measure the steps/tasks a student will complete because schedules of online instructors and students do not often coincide with each other, hence one of the reasons for taking classes online. This does not rule out using performance assessments in online settings to grade the product, which is how it is usually employed in online settings. In this way, the instructor can indirectly observe the process by looking at the product. However, it does present a problem for using performance assessments as formative assessments in online settings since formative assessments rely on observing the process that one goes through to create a product. Since performance assessments often help us to see and understand a student’s reasoning and understanding, (either directly through observing the process or indirectly through observing the product) they can provide insights about students that written tests cannot. Having online students participate in creating an actual product (such as an education student creating an actual test) will help the instructor better determine what the student can do with the course knowledge than a written test (about rules and procedures for creating a test) could determine.
In online settings, performance assessments can be used to teach complex skills if they are used effectively because students who know they will have to complete a performance assessment will learn the material differently than if they were studying for a written test. Also, the teacher will be more likely to teach students differently in order to ensure their success with the performance assessment. In other words, they will not only memorize information, they will try to understand it so they can use and apply it. This should be the goal of both face-to face and online settings because our goals should always be to help student use higher levels of thinking. Since many online classes are designed for working professionals, their reasons for taking the classes require them to not only know something (declarative knowledge), but also be able to use and apply the knowledge (procedural knowledge). They also tend to need to be able to overcome difficulties and solve problems in their work environments. Because of this and the fact that performance assessments can measure problem solving skills, whereas written tests cannot, they are a very natural, well-suited, and valuable tool in an online educational setting.
Another reason performance assessment is well suited for online learning is because they require less security than written tests require. Often, the scoring plan or an actual model will be given to the students before they are required to complete the performance assessment, whereas the answer key for a written test would never be given to the students. This is especially helpful in an online environment since security issues are often more difficult to overcome than in face-to-face settings.
References
Oosterhof, A., Conrad, R., Ely, D. (2008). Assessing Learners Online. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.
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