Beyond the Bubble Test

How Performance Assessments Support 21st Century Learning

Linda Darling-Hammond, Frank Adamson

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118889299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Performance assessment is a hot topic in school systems, and educators continue to analyze its costs, benefits, and feasibility as a replacement for high-stakes testing. Until now, researchers and policymakers have had to dig to find out what we know and what we still have to learn about performance assessment. Beyond the Bubble Test: How Performance Assessments Support 21st Century Learning synthesizes the latest findings in the field, and not a moment too soon.

Statistics indicate that the United States is in danger of falling behind if it fails to adapt to our changing world. The memory and recall strategies of traditional testing are no longer adequate to equip our students with the skills they need to excel in the global economy. Instead teachers need to engage students in deeper learning, assessing their ability to use higher-order skills.

Skills like synthesizing information, understanding evidence, and critical problem-solving are not achieved when we teach to multiple-choice exams. Examples in Beyond the Bubble Test paint a useful picture of how schools can begin to supplement traditional tests with something that works better. This book provides new perspectives on current performance assessment research, plus an incisive look at what's possible at the local and state levels.

Linda Darling-Hammond, with a team of leading scholars, bring together lessons learned, new directions, and solid recommendations into a single, readily accessible compendium. Beyond the Bubble Test situates the current debate on performance assessment within the context of testing in the United States. This comprehensive resource also looks beyond our U.S. borders to Singapore, Hong Kong, and other places whose reform-mindedness can serve as an example to us.

Chapter 1
Introduction: The Rationale and Context for Performance Assessment

Linda Darling-Hammond

I am calling on our nation’s Governors and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking, entrepreneurship and creativity.

—President Barack Obama, March 2009

Over the past decade, the effects of US test-driven accountability practices have been the focus of intense debate. Disappointment about the performance of US students on international tests, concern about the nation’s global competitiveness, and questions about our students’ readiness to enter college and the workforce have led to another wave of efforts to significantly reform American education.

A recurring theme in the public debate among educators, business leaders, elected officials, and community members is the need for schools to focus on a new and expanded skill set in order for American students to compete in a digital age. The discourse centers on the need to measure the core knowledge and higher-order skills critical to postsecondary learning and career success. In particular, growing emphasis on critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and communication skills has led to calls for a more balanced assessment system that includes authentic measures of student performance.

The United States is not alone in this pursuit. Reform of educational standards and assessments has been a constant theme in nations around the globe. New curriculum approaches and assessments have recently been adopted in Singapore, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom, among many others. For example, as Singapore prepared to overhaul its assessment system, its education minister at that time, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, noted, “[We need] less dependence on rote learning, repetitive tests and a ‘one size fits all’ type of instruction, and more on engaged learning, discovery through experiences, differentiated teaching, the learning of life-long skills, and the building of character, so that students can . . . develop the attributes, mindsets, character and values for future success” (Ng, 2008).

As part of an effort to keep up with countries that appear to be galloping ever further ahead educationally, US governors and chief state school officers recently issued the Common Core State Standards in English language arts and mathematics that aim to outline internationally benchmarked concepts and skills needed for success in today’s world. The standards, adopted by forty-five states and three territories, intend to create “fewer, higher, and deeper” curriculum goals that ensure that students are college and career-ready (http://www.corestandards.org).

This goal has profound implications for teaching and testing. Genuine readiness for college and careers, as well as participation in today’s democratic society, requires, as President Obama has noted, much more than “bubbling in” on a test. Students need to be able to find, evaluate, synthesize, and use knowledge in new contexts; frame and solve nonroutine problems; and produce research findings and solutions. It also requires students to acquire well-developed thinking, problem-solving, design, and communication skills.

The recently released report of the Gordon Commission on Future Assessment in Education (2013), sponsored by the Educational Testing Service and written by the nation’s leading experts in curriculum, teaching, and assessment, described the most critical objectives this way:

To be helpful in achieving the learning goals laid out in the Common Core, assessments must fully represent the competencies that the increasingly complex and changing world demands. The best assessments can accelerate the acquisition of these competencies if they guide the actions of teachers and enable students to gauge their progress. To do so, the tasks and activities in the assessments must be models worthy of the attention and energy of teachers and students. The Commission calls on policy makers at all levels to actively promote this badly needed transformation in current assessment practice. . . . The assessment systems [must] be robust enough to drive the instructional changes required to meet the standards . . . and provide evidence of student learning useful to teachers.

New assessments must advance competencies that are matched to the era in which we live. Contemporary students must be able to evaluate the validity and relevance of disparate pieces of information and draw conclusions from them. They need to use what they know to make conjectures and seek evidence to test them, come up with new ideas, and contribute productively to their networks, whether on the job or in their communities. As the world grows increasingly complex and interconnected, people need to be able to recognize patterns, make comparisons, resolve contradictions, and understand causes and effects. They need to learn to be comfortable with ambiguity and recognize that perspective shapes information and the meanings we draw from it. At the most general level, the emphasis in our educational systems needs to be on helping individuals make sense out of the world and how to operate effectively within it. Finally, it is also important that assessments do more than document what students are capable of and what they know. To be as useful as possible, assessments should provide clues as to why students think the way they do and how they are learning as well as the reasons for misunderstandings. (p. 7)

These are the so-called twenty-first-century skills that reformers around the world have been urging schools to pursue for decades—skills that are increasingly in demand in a complex, technologically connected, and fast-changing world. As research by economists Richard Murnane and Frank Levy (1996) shows, the routine skills used in factory jobs that once fueled an industrial economy have declined sharply in demand as they are computerized, outsourced, or made extinct by the changing nature of work. The skills in greatest demand are the nonroutine interactive skills that require collaborative invention and problem solving (see figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 How the Demand for Skills Has Changed: Economy-Wide Measures of Routine and Nonroutine Task Input

Source: Murnane and Levy (1996).

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (2012), Lessons from PISA for Japan, Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education, OECD Publishing, http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264118539-en

In part, this is because knowledge is expanding at a breathtaking pace. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, estimate that in the three years from 1999 to 2002, the amount of new information produced in the world approximately equaled the amount produced in the entire history of the world previously (Lyman & Varian, 2003). The amount of new technical information was doubling every two years at the turn of the century (McCain & Jukes, 2001) and is now doubling every year.

As a consequence, a successful education can no longer be organized by dividing a set of static facts into the twelve years of schooling, to be doled out to students bit by bit each year. Instead, schools must teach disciplinary knowledge in ways that also help students learn how to learn, so that they can use knowledge in new situations and manage the demands of changing information, technologies, jobs, and social conditions.

Whether the context is the changing nature of work, international competitiveness, or, most recently, calls for common standards, the premium today is not merely on students’ acquiring information, but on recognizing what kind of information matters, why it matters, and how to combine it with other information to solve complex problems (Silva, 2008). Remembering pieces of knowledge is no longer the highest priority for learning; what counts is what students can do with the knowledge they acquire.

THE NEED FOR PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENTS

In order to encourage and measure this kind of learning, performance assessments that reflect how students acquire and use knowledge to solve real-world problems are increasingly needed. Many high-achieving nations have developed national or state curriculum guidance that incorporates performance assessments that require students to solve complex real-world problems and defend their ideas orally and in writing. These assessments—which include research projects, science investigations, mathematical and computer models, and other products—are mapped to the syllabus and the standards for the subject and are selected because they represent critical skills, topics, and concepts. They are generally designed, administered, and scored by teachers in local schools.

These nations recognize that classroom-embedded performance tasks allow the development and assessment of more complex skills that cannot be measured in a two-hour test on a single day. Such assessment systems shape the curriculum in ways that ensure stronger learning opportunities. They give teachers timely, formative information they need to help students improve—something that standardized examinations with long lapses between administration and results cannot do. And they help teachers become more knowledgeable about the standards and how to teach to them, as well as about their own students and how they learn. The process of using these assessments improves their teaching and their students’ learning. The processes of collective scoring and moderation that many nations or states use to ensure reliability in scoring also prove educative for teachers, who learn to calibrate their sense of the standards to common benchmarks.

During the 1990s, many US states developed systems that featured state and locally administered performance assessments. These states included Connecticut, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Rhode Island, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming, among others. In addition, some districts and consortia of schools have constructed well-developed performance assessment systems that engage students in developing high-quality pro...