PRODUCT-ORIENTED PERFORMANCE-BASED ASSESSMENT

The role of assessment in teaching happens to be a hot issue in education today. This has led
to an increasing interest in “performance-based education.” Performance-based education poses a
challenge for teachers to design instruction that is task-oriented. The trend is based on the premise
that learning needs to be connected to the lives of the students through relevant tasks that focus on
students’ ability to use their knowledge and skills in meaningful ways. In this case, performance-
based tasks require performance-based assessments in which the actual student performance is
assessed through a product, such as a completed project or work that demonstrates levels of task
achievement. At times, performance-based assessment has been used interchangeably with
“authentic assessment” and “alternative assessment.” In all cases, performance-based assessment
has led to the use of a variety of alternative ways of evaluating student progress (journals, checklists,
portfolios, projects, rubrics, etc.) as compared to more traditional methods of measurement (paper-
and-pencil testing).
1. Product-Oriented Learning Competencies
Student performances can be defined as targeted tasks that lead to a product or overall
learning outcome. Products can include a wide range of student works that target specific skills.
Some examples include communication skills such as those demonstrated in reading, writing,
speaking, and listening, or psychomotor skills requiring physical abilities to perform a given task.
Target tasks can also include behavior expectations targeting complex tasks that students are
expected to achieve. Using rubrics is one way that teachers can evaluate or assess student
performance or proficiency in any given task as it relates to a final product or learning outcome.
Thus, rubrics can provide valuable information about the degree to which a student has achieved a
defined learning outcome based on specific criteria that defined the framework for evaluation.
The learning competencies associated with products or outputs are linked with an assessment
of the level of “expertise” manifested by the product. Thus, product-oriented learning competencies
target at least three (3) levels: novice or beginner’s level, skilled level, and expert level. Such levels
correspond to Bloom’s taxonomy in the cognitive domain in that they represent progressively higher
levels of complexity in the thinking processes.
There are other ways to state product-oriented learning competencies. For instance, we can
define learning competencies for products or outputs in the following way:
Level 1: Does the finished product or project illustrate the minimum expected parts or
functions? (Beginner)
Level 2: Does the finished product or project contain additional parts and functions on top of
the minimum requirements which tend to enhance the final output? (Skilled level)
Level 3: Does the finished product contain the basic minimum parts and functions, have
additional features on top of the minimum, and is aesthetically pleasing? (Expert level)
Example: The desired product is a representation of a cubic prism made out of cardboard in an
elementary geometry class.
Learning Competencies: The final product submitted by the students must:
1. possess the correct dimensions (5” x 5” x 5”) - (minimum specifications)
2. be sturdy, made of durable cardboard and properly fastened together - (skilled
specifications)
3. be pleasing to the observer, preferably properly colored for aesthetic purposes - (expert
level)
 Example: The product desired is a scrapbook illustrating the historical event called EDSA I
People Power.
Learning Competencies: The scrapbook presented by the students must:
1. contain pictures, newspaper clippings and other illustration for the main characters of EDSA
I People Power namely. Corazon Aquino, Fidel V. Ramos, Juan Ponce Enrile, Ferdinand E.
Marcos, Cardinal Sin. - (minimum specifications)
2. contain remarks and captions for the illustrations made by the student himself for the roles
played by the characters of EDSA I People Power - (skilled level)
3. be presentable, complete, informative and pleasing to the reader of the scrapbook - (expert
level).
Performance-based assessment for products and projects can also be used for assessing
outputs of short-term tasks such as the one illustrated below for outputs in a typing class.
Example: The desired output consists of the output in a typing class.
Learning Competencies: The final typing outputs of the students must:
1. possess no more than five (5) errors in spelling - (minimum specifications)
2. possess no more than 5 errors in spelling while observing proper format based on the
document to be typewritten - (skilled level)
3. possess no more than 5 errors in spelling, has the proper format, and is readable and
presentable - (expert level).
Notice that in all of the above examples, product-oriented performance based learning
competencies are evidence-based. The teacher needs concrete evidence that the student has
achieved a certain level of competence based on submitted products and projects.
2. Task Designing
How should a teacher design a task for product-oriented performance based assessment? The
design of the task in this context depends on what the teacher desires to observe as outputs of the
students. The concepts that may be associated with task designing include:
a. Complexity - The level of complexity of the project needs to be within the range of ability of
the students. Projects that are too simple tend to be uninteresting for the students while projects
that are too complicated will most likely frustrate them.
b. Appeal - The project or activity must be appealing to the students. It should be interesting
enough so that students are encouraged to pursue the task to completion. It should lead to self-
discovery of information by the students.
c. Creativity - The project needs to encourage students to exercise creativity and divergent
thinking. Given the same set of materials and project inputs, how does one best present the project?
It should lead the students into exploring the various possible ways of presenting the final output.
d. Goal-Based - Finally, the teacher must bear in mind that the project is produced in order to
attain a learning objective. Thus, projects are assigned to students not just for the sake of producing
something but for the purpose of reinforcing learning.
Example: Paper folding is a traditional Japanese art. However, it can be used as an activity to
teach the concept of plane and solid figures in geometry. Provide the students with a given number
of colored papers and ask them to construct as many plane and solid figures from these papers
without cutting them (by paper folding only)
Exercises:
Design a project or task for each of the following learning objectives:
1. Analyze the events leading to Rizal’s martyrdom.
2. Differentiate between monocotyledon and dicotyledon.
3. Find an approximate value of the gravitational constant, g.
4. Illustrate the concept of “diffusion”.
5. Illustrate the concept of “osmosis”.
6. Illustrate the cultural diversity in the Philippines.
7. Identify similarities and differences of at least two major dialects in the Philippines.

3. Scoring Rubrics
Scoring rubrics are descriptive scoring schemes that are developed by teachers or other
evaluators to guide the analysis of the products or processes of students’ efforts (Brookhart,1999).
Scoring rubrics are typically employed when a judgment of quality is required and may be used to
evaluate a broad range of subjects and activities, For instance, scoring rubrics can be most useful in
grading essays or in evaluating projects such as scrapbooks. Judgments concerning the quality of a
given writing sample may vary depending upon the criteria established by the individual evaluator.
One evaluator may heavily weigh the evaluation process upon the linguistic structure, while another
evaluator may be more interested in the persuasiveness of the argument. A high quality essay is
likely to have a combination of these and other factors. By developing a pre-defined scheme for the
evaluation process, the subjectivity involved in evaluating an essay becomes more objective.
3.1 Criteria Setting - The criteria for scoring rubrics are statements which identify “what really
counts” in the final output. The following are the most often used major criteria for product
assessment:
 Quality
 Creativity
 Comprehensiveness
 Accuracy
 Aesthetics
From the major criteria, the next task is to identify substatements that would make the
major criteria more focused and objective. For instance, if we were scoring an essay on: “Three
Hundred Years of Spanish Rule in the Philippines”, the major criterion “Quality” may possess the
following substatements:
 interrelates the chronological events in an interesting manner
 identifies the key players in each period of the Spanish rule and the roles that they
played
 succeeds in relating the history of Philippine Spanish rule (rated as Professional, Not
quite professional, and Novice)
The example below displays a scoring rubric that was developed to aid in the evaluation of essays
written by college students in the classroom (based loosely on Leydens & Thompson, 1997).
Example of a scoring rubric designed to evaluate college writing samples.
Major Criterion: Meets expectations for a first draft of a professional report
Substatements:
The document can be easily followed. A combination of the following are apparent in the
document:
1. Effective transitions are used throughout.
2. A professional format is used.
3. The graphics are descriptive and clearly support the documents purpose.
Adequate
The document can be easily followed. A combination of the following are apparent in the
document:
1. Basic transitions are used.
2. A structured format is used.
3. Some supporting graphics are provided, but are not clearly explained.
The document contains minimal distractions that appear in a combination of the following
forms:
1. Flow in thought
2. Graphical presentations
3. Grammar/mechanics
Needs Improvement
Organization of document is difficult to follow due to a combination of following:
1. Inadequate transitions
2. Rambling format
3. Insufficient or irrelevant information
4. Ambiguous graphics
The document contains numerous distractions that appear in the combination of the following
form:
1. Flow in thought
2. Graphical presentations
3. Grammar/mechanics
Inadequate
There appears to be no organization of the document’s contents.
Sentences are difficult to read and understand

The scoring rubrics in this particular example exemplifies what is called a “holistic scoring
rubric”. It will be noted that each score category describes the characteristics of a response that
would receive the respective score. Describing the characteristic of responses within each score
category increases the likelihood that two independent evaluators would assign the same score to a
given response. In effect, this increases the objectivity of the assessment procedure using rubrics. In
the language of test and measurement, we are actually increasing the “inter-rater reliability”.
When are scoring rubrics an appropriate evaluation technique?
Grading essays is just one example of performances that may be evaluated using scoring
rubrics. There are many other instances in which scoring rubrics may be used successfully: evaluate
group activities, extended projects and oral presentations (e.g., Chicago Public Schools, 1999;
Danielson, 1997a; 1997b; Schrock, 2000; Moskal, 2000). Also, rubrics scoring cuts across disciplines
and subject matter for they are equally appropriate to the English, Mathematics and Science
classrooms (e.g., Chicago Public Schools, 1999; State of Colorado, 1999; Danielson, 1997a; 1997b;
Danielson & Marquez, 1998; Schrock, 2000). Where and when a scoring rubric is used does not
depend on the grade level or subject, but rather on the purpose of the assessment.
Other Methods
Authentic assessment schemes apart from scoring rubrics exist in the arsenal of a teacher. For
example, checklists may be used rather than scoring rubrics in the evaluation of essays. Checklists
enumerate a set of desirable characteristics for a certain product and the teacher marks those
characteristics which are actually observed. As such, checklists are an appropriate choice for
evaluation when the information that is sought is limited to the determination of whether or not
specific criteria have been met. On the other hand, scoring rubrics are based on descriptive scales
and support the evaluation of the extent to which criteria have been met.
The ultimate consideration in using a scoring rubrics for assessment is really the “purpose of
the assessment.” Scoring rubrics provide at least two benefits in the evaluation process. First, they
support the examination of the extent to which the specified criteria have been reached. Second,
they provide feedback to students concerning how to improve their performances. If these benefits
are consistent with the purpose of the assessment, then a scoring rubric is likely to be an
appropriate evaluation technique.
General versus Task-Specific
In the development of the scoring rubrics, it is well to bear in mind that it can be used to
assess or evaluate specific tasks or general or broad category of tasks. For instance, suppose that we
are interested in assessing the student’s oral communication skills. Then, a general scoring rubric
may be developed and used to evaluate each of the oral presentations given by that student. After
each such oral presentation of the students, the general scoring rubrics are shown to the students
which then allow them to improve on their previous performances. Scoring rubrics have this
advantage of instantaneously providing a mechanism for immediate feedback.
In contrast, suppose the main purpose of the oral presentation is to determine the students’
knowledge of the facts surrounding the EDSA I revolution, then perhaps a specific scoring rubric
would be necessary. A general scoring rubric for evaluating a sequence of presentations may not be
adequate since, in general, events such as EDSA I (and EDSA II) differ on the situations surrounding
factors (what caused the revolutions) and the ultimate outcomes of these events. Thus, to evaluate
the students’ knowledge of these events, it will be necessary to develop specific rubrics scoring
guide for each presentation.
Process of Developing Scoring Rubrics
The development of scoring rubrics goes through a process. The first step in the process
entails the identification of the qualities and attributes that the teacher wishes to observe in the
students’ outputs that would demonstrate their level of proficiency. (Brookhart, 1999). These
qualities and attributes form the top level of the scoring criteria for the rubrics. Once done, a
decision has to be made whether a holistic or an analytical rubric would be more appropriate. In an
analytic scoring rubric, each criterion i8 considered one by one and the descriptions of the scoring
levels are made separately. This will then result in separate descriptive scoring schemes for each of
the criterion or scoring factor. On the other hand, for holistic scoring rubrics, the collection of
criteria is considered throughout the construction of each level of the scoring rubric and the result is
single descriptive scoring scheme.
The next step after defining the criteria for the top level of performance is the identification
and definition of the criteria for the lowest level of performance. In other words, the teacher is
asked to determine the type of performance that would constitute the worst performance or a
performance which would indicate lack of understanding of the concepts being measured. The
underlying reason for this step is for the teacher to capture the criteria that would suit a middle level
performance for the concept being measured. In particular, therefore, the approach suggested
would result in at least three levels of performance.
It is of course possible to make greater and greater distinctions between performances. For
instance, we can compare the middle level performance expectations with the best performance
criterion and come up with an above average performance criterion; between the middle level
performance expectations and the worst level of performance to come up with a slightly below
average performance criteria and so on. This comparison process can be used until the desired
number of score levels is reached or until no further distinctions can be made. If meaningful
distinctions between the score categories cannot be made, then additional score categories should
not be created (Brookhart, 1999). It is better to have a few meaningful score categories than to have
many score categories that are difficult or impossible to distinguish.
A note of caution, it is suggested that each score category should be defined using descriptors
of the work rather than value-judgement about the work (Brookhart, 1999). For example, “Student’s
sentences contain no errors in subject-verb agreements,” is preferable over “Student’s sentences
are good.” The phrase “are good” requires the evaluator to make a judgement whereas the phrase
“no errors” is quantifiable. Finally, we can test whether our scoring rubrics is “reliable” by asking two
or more teachers to score the same set of projects or outputs and correlate their individual
assessments. High correlations between the raters imply high interrater reliability. If the scores
assigned by teachers differ greatly, then such would suggest a way to refine the scoring rubrics we
have developed. It may be necessary to clarify the scoring rubrics so that they would mean the same
thing to different scorers.
Resources
Currently, there is a broad range of resources available to teachers who wish to use scoring
rubrics in their classrooms. These resources differ both in the subject that they cover and the level
that they are designed to assess. The examples provided below are only s small sample of the
information that is available.
For K-12 teachers, the State of Colorado (1998) has developed an on-line set of general,
holistic scoring rubrics that are designed for the evaluation of various writing assessments. The
Chicago Public Schools (1999) maintain an extensive electronic list of analytic and holistic scoring
rubrics that span the broad array of subjects represented throughout K-12 education. For the
mathematics teachers, Danielson has developed a collection of reference books that contain scoring
rubrics that are appropriate to the elementary, middle school and high school mathematics
classrooms (1997a, 1997b; Danielson & Marquez, 1998).
Resources are also available to assist college instructors who are interested in developing and
using scoring rubrics in their classrooms. Kathy Schrock’s Guide for Educators (2000) contains
electronic materials for both the pre-college and the college classroom. In The Art and Science of
Classroom Assessment: The Missing Part of Pedagogy, Brookhart (1999) provides a brief, but
comprehensive review of the literature on assessment in the college classroom. This includes a
description of scoring rubrics and why their use is increasing in the college classroom. Moskal (1999)
has developed a web site that contains links to a variety of college assessment resources, including
scoring rubrics.
 The resources described represent only a fraction of those that are available. The ERIC
Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation [ERIC/AE] provides several additional useful web sites.
One of these, Scoring Rubrics - Definitions & Constructions (2000b), specifically addresses questions
that are frequently asked with regard to scoring rubrics. This site also provides electronic links to
web resources and bibliographic references to books and articles that discuss scoring rubrics. For
more recent developments within assessment and evaluation, a search can be completed on the
abstracts of papers that will soon be available through ERIC/AE (2000a). This site also contains a
direct link to ERIC/AE abstracts that are specific to scoring rubrics.
Search engines that are available on the web may be used to locate additional electronic
resources. When using this approach, the search criteria should be as specific as possible. Generic
searches that use the terms “rubrics” or “scoring rubrics” will yield a large volume of references.
When seeking information on scoring rubrics from the web, it is advisable to use an advanced search
and specify the grade level, subject area and topic of interest. If more resources are desired than
result from this conservative approach, the search criteria can be expanded.
Name:___________________________________________________Course:_____________
Activity #______

A. Differentiate between a “process-oriented” and a “product-oriented” performance-based

assessment.
B. Select three (3) from the following and develop a scoring rubric for each:
1. Essay on “Why Jose Rizal Should be the National hero”
2. Essay on “Should the Power Industry be Deregulated?”
3. Oral presentation of the piece “Land of Bondage, Land of the Free”
4. Oral presentation of the piece “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”
5. Scrapbook on “EDSA I Revolution”
6. Group activity on “ Geometric Shapes through Paper Folding”
7. Specimen preservation in a biological diversity class
8. Evaluating an output of a typing class
9. Writing a short computer program on “Roots of a Quadratic Equation”
10. Group activity on solutes and solvents
11. Laboratory output in frog dissection
12. Laboratory output in determining the gravitational constant using a free fall experiment
13. Evaluating an art work on candle-blowing exercise
14. Evaluating a kinder piano performance
15. Evaluating performance in argumentation and debate