John Olson’s scientific contributions

A forward-thinking look at performance assessment in the 21st century Next Generation Assessment: Moving Beyond the Bubble Test to Support 21st Century Learning provides needed answers to the nation's growing concerns about educational testing in America. Drawing on research and the experiences of leading states and countries, this new book examines how performance assessments can offer a feasible alternative to current high stakes tests. As parents, educators, and policymakers have increasingly criticized the effects of the teaching to the test mandate from the No Child Left Behind Act, the need for this resource has never been more critical. This summary volume to Beyond the Bubble Test speaks to the nationwide unease about current tests' focus on low-level skills, like recalling and restating facts, rather than higher-order skills such as problem-solving, analyzing, and synthesizing information. It illustrates how schools can use authentic assessments to improve teaching and learning as they involve students in conducting research, designing investigations, developing products and solutions, using technology, and communicating their ideas in many forms. This important book: Serves as a must-have resource for those interested in the most current research about how to create valid and reliable performance assessments Explains how educators can improve practice by developing, using, and scoring performance assessments Helps policymakers and educators accurately assess the benefits and possibilities of adopting performance assessments nationally If you're an educator, researcher, graduate student, district administrator, or education policy specialist, Next Generation Assessment is an indispensable resource you'll turn to again and again.

This chapter presents recent data and analysis that illustrate how higher-quality assessments can become affordable. The United States is poised to take a major step in the direction of curriculum and assessments for deeper learning with the adoption of the Common Core State Standards in more than forty states. Policymakers would like to know whether the benefits of performance assessment justify the burdens. The benefits may justify the burdens from the perspective of education. As illustrated in the chapter, the costs associated with performance assessments have declined over the past decade, making it more attractive to incorporate some degree of performance assessment into state testing programs. Some states in the U.S. and nearly all local districts are making considerable investments in interim and benchmark assessments, test preparation materials and programs, and interventions to improve scores.

Performance assessments have been an integral part of educational systems in most high-achieving countries and some states in the United States. Evidence suggests that the nature and format of assessments affect the depth of knowledge and types of skills developed by students and that performance assessments are better suited to assessing high-level, complex thinking skills. The review presented in this book suggests that large-scale testing in the United States could be improved by the thoughtful incorporation of well-constructed performance assessments that can represent higher-order, cognitively demanding performance standards; provide clearer signals to teachers about the kinds of student performances that are valued; and reduce pressures to mimic multiple-choice teaching in classroom instruction. This chapter presents steps that states interested in pursuing a system of assessments within a productive approach to accountability should consider.

Using more comparable, contemporary data from a carefully grounded study by the Assessment Solutions Group (ASG) demonstrates that it is possible to construct affordable, large-scale assessment systems that include a significant number of constructed-response items, reliably scored classroom-based performance tasks, and traditional multiple-choice questions for no more than the cost of the much-less-informative systems used today. ASG developed cost models providing an apples-to-apples comparison for two types of tests: a typical summative multiple-choice test with primarily multiple-choice items and a high-quality assessment that includes more constructed response items and new item types, such as performance events (relatively short curriculum-embedded tasks) and more ambitious performance tasks. In the context of a tightly integrated teaching and learning system, the use of performance assessment may offer an important and much more cost-effective method for influencing instructional practice.

There are some legitimate questions and concerns about performance assessments. Under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program, many states had difficulty receiving approval from the federal Department of Education for performance elements of their systems. Research in the United States and others suggests that performance assessments can play an important role in ensuring that the nation's students learn the higher-order skills they need. This chapter describes the advances made and lessons learned. Some assessment experts, like Robert Mislevy, argue that performance assessments can provide better measurement of growth and change in higher-order cognitive abilities and problem-solving strategies. An analysis of dozens of studies by British researchers Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam found that the regular use of these kinds of open-ended assessments with clear criteria to guide feedback, student revision, and teachers' instructional decisions, called formative assessments, produces larger learning.

There is no shortage of creative ideas for assessing learning and performance in authentic ways. The challenge has been developing and maintaining such assessments at scale in ways that consistently set expectations and provide incentives for deeper learning. Fortunately, there is much to learn about large-scale performance assessment from state systems in the United States and abroad. A number of states have developed performance assessments as part of their state testing systems, and some of these were preserved in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era. This chapter illustrates the types of tasks that students complete to fulfill each of the English course units. These include the Acid Rain Task of Connecticut Ninth/Tenth Grade Science Assessment, the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) English in England, and the Project Work of Singapore Examinations and Assessment Board (SEAB).

This chapter presents a number of important Common Core standards that cannot be directly measured by consortia assessments. A system of assessment may include large-scale assessments that offer information to policymakers along with much richer school or classroom assessments that offer more detailed information to guide teachers as they develop curriculum and instruction and students as they revise their work and set learning goals. Students can learn a great deal from assessments beyond where they stand in comparison to other students or the teacher's expectations as expressed in a grade or a test score. A system-of-assessments approach opens the door to a much wider array of measurement instruments and approaches. Accountability for education is achieved when the policies and practices of a school, district, and state work both to provide quality education and to correct problems as they occur.

Schools must teach disciplinary knowledge in ways that also help students learn how to learn, so that they can use their knowledge in new situations and manage the demands of changing information, technologies, jobs, and social conditions. In addition to the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English language arts and mathematics, a consortium of states in the USA has developed a set of Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) that also aim for more intellectually ambitious learning and teaching. Researchers argue that by tapping into students' advanced thinking skills and abilities to explain their reasoning, performance assessments yield a more complete picture of students' strengths and weaknesses. The Partnership for Assessing Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) assessments, to be launched in 2014?2015, will increase the use of constructed response items and performance tasks.

For many people, performance assessment is most easily defined by what it is not: specifically, it is not multiple-choice testing. Performance events can take several forms, including requests that can be answered by what are called constructed-response items-those that require students to create a response-within a relatively short time in a traditional on-demand test that students sit down to take. Educators often refer to lower-level versus higher-order skills. The best-known approach to describing these is Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive skills. Assessment strategies can be thought of as existing along a continuum. At one end are the multiple-choice and close-ended items found in traditional tests. At the other end are assessments that require substantial student initiation of designs, ideas, and performances, tapping the planning and work management skills especially needed for college and careers. The chapter presents a number of exhibits as samples of performance assessment.