Why I Do Performance Based Assessments

My grade sevens were finishing up their interactive notebooks on shapes in structures and how to reinforce them.  They were very proud of the work they had created and felt confident in their learning when I talked with them.  Looking at their Do Now answers from the start of the class and their exit slips, they appeared to know the content.  It was time for a summative assessment.

I told them that their assessment would be a building challenge.  One student asked me if it would be multiple choice!  I explained that they would show me what they have learned and what they still need to work through by building a structure using the knowledge they had just been working through.  I introduced the building challenge and had them working through their designs in their teams.

One student asked me if it was cheating by working together on an assessment.  It was clear that my students had preconceptions about what an assessment should be and that I had not done a very good job of explaining why I wanted them to build instead of circling "c" on a paper.  I stopped the class and the students at her table team to answer a few questions about what we were learning.  They could tell me what the strongest shape was, how it was strong, how to reinforce it, how to use it in a building  design, etc.  They answered each question I asked them beautifully.  Then I asked them to look at what they were designing for their challenge.  None of those ideas were present.  I asked each team to look at their design- were they applying their learning from the textbook tower challenge, form their notebook work and from the discussions we have had  to the new situation?  I told the class that THIS is why were doing our assessment this way.  I told them that they have memorized the vocabulary wonderfully, but we needed to see that they truly LEARNED the concepts.  It was a beautiful moment of clarity for them.  We briefly discussed memorizing vs learning and why we do assessments that check how well you learned the vocabulary (like exit slips and multiple choice tests), and how well you learned and can APPLY the concepts, like team assessments.

I will continue to be overt in explaining my assessment methods to my students throughout the year.  I hope it helps them be more cognizant of their role in their own learning and to wean them of the do a test-get a mark way of thinking about learning.

Here are some pictures of a straw bridge building assessment in which teams of students had to apply their knowledge, build and test a structure, then write about it using their word wall words and key concepts.