Assessment for the 21st Century

Imagine a world in which to get your driver’s license, all you have to do is take the written test. There would be no actual in-car assessment or demonstration of your skills behind the wheel. While the written portion is essential basic knowledge, it does not give one the necessary skills to problem solve on the road. Would you know how to change lanes in bumper to bumper traffic? Merge onto a highway full of speeding cars? Many people balk at the idea of learning to drive this way, calling it ludicrous. Yet it is primarily the way we educate our children … there’s a lot of testing to determine how much students know but we don’t ask students to demonstrate their knowledge through problem solving and projects.

This week, there was a forum on using performance assessment to enhance teaching and learning for higher order skills. The foundation for the forum was the notion that expectations for learning are changing – higher order thinking and performance skills are essential for guiding teaching and learning in order to prepare students for 21st century careers and college.

Take the story of Kiri Davis, one of the forum’s panelists, and now a college sophomore and graduate of the Urban Academy Laboratory High School in New York City. Kiri talked about her experiences at Urban, which is one of the schools in the NY Performance Standards Consortium. These schools have developed an approach to teaching and a system for performance based assessment where students are actively involved in their learning and challenged to meet rigorous academic standards. For one creative arts assessment, Kiri built upon several classes she had taken and an internship to produce a documentary film, which was later shown at the Tribeca Film Festival and it won several awards. Kiri expressed her support for performance assessment, noting she learned far more from creating and producing a film than she ever would have learned by filling in a scantron sheet. Kiri said it best: “I don’t want to be only worth as high as my test score.”

Yet developing performance based assessment does come with its own set of challenges. We must still hold educators collectively accountable for student learning and offer them support to learn, build, use and score assessments that will inform and guide their teaching. Teachers need time to plan, evaluate and share data together.

State and district leaders will also need to become skilled in developing and managing these assessments AND providing assistance to classroom teachers in order to make the system work.

As a nation, can we really afford to send our young people into the 21st century workforce without any real-life, authentic experiences?