NATURE OF PERFORMANCE-BASED ASSESSMENT

Performance-Based Assessment

 Is one in which the teacher observes and makes a judgement about the student’s demonstration
of a skill or competency in creating a product, constructing a response, or making a presentation
(McMillan, 2007).
 Is an alternative form of assessment that moves away from traditional paper-and-pencil tests
(Ferman, 2005). It involves students to produce project, whether it is in oral, written or group
performance.

Types of Performance Tasks

1. Solving a problem – Critical thinking and problem solving are important skills that need to be sharpened
and developed by the learners.

2. Completing an inquiry – Includes science investigation, research-based activities, survey and interviews
or independent studies.

3. Determining a position – This task requires students to make decision or clarify a position. Case analysis
and issue related activities or debate are some examples of this task.

4. Demonstration Task – This task shows how the students use knowledge and skills to complete well-
defined complex tasks. Examples are demonstrating steps or procedure of cooking, explaining the
earthquake safety procedures and demonstrating how to set-up microscope for viewing slides.

5. Developing Exhibits – Exhibits are visual presentations or displays that need little or no explanation
from the creators. An exhibit is offered to explain, demonstrate or show something.

6. Presentation Task – This is a work or task performed in front of an audience. Storytelling, singing and
dancing, musical play or theatrical acting are some presentations which demonstrate performance task.

7. Capstone Performances – These are tasks that occur at the end of a program of study. These tasks are
research paper, practice teaching, internship or on-the-job training.

Strengths

1. Performance assessment clearly identifies and clarifies learning targets.

2. Performance assessment allows students to exhibit their own skills, talents and expertise.

3. Performance assessment advocates constructivist principle of learning.

4. Performance assessment uses a variety of approaches to student evaluation.

5. Performance assessment allows the teachers to explore the main goal and processes of teaching and
learning process.

Limitations

1. Development of high quality performance assessment is a tedious process.

2. Performance assessment requires a considerable amount of time to administer.

3. Performance assessment takes a great deal of time to score.

4. Performance task score may have lower reliability.

5. Performance task completion may be discouraging to less able students.

Rubrics and Exemplars

Modern assessment methods tend to use rubrics to describe student performance. A rubric is a coherent
set of criteria for students’ work that includes descriptions of levels of performance quality on the criteria.
The main purpose of rubrics is to assess performance made evident in processes and products.

Advantage of Using a Scoring Rubrics

1. Rubrics is a useful tool for both teaching and evaluating the learning outcomes. Rubrics have the
potential to improve student performance, as well as monitor it, by clarifying teachers’ expectations and
by actually guiding the students how to satisfy these expectations.

2. Rubrics seem to allow students to acquire wisdom in judging and evaluating the quality of their own
work in relation to the quality of the work of other students.

3. Rubrics are quite efficient and tend to require less time for the teachers in evaluating student
performance.

4. It is easy to understand and construct a rubrics scoring guide. Most of the items found in the rubrics
scoring guide are self-explanatory and require no further help from outside experts.

Well-designed rubrics include:

 Performance dimensions that are critical to successful task completion;

 criteria that reflect all the important outcomes of the performance task;
 a rating scale that provides a usable, easily-interpreted score;
 criteria that reflect concrete references, in clear language understandable to students, parent,
and other teachers; and others.