authentic assessments, and scoring often requires
subjective judgment”.
Performance – Based
Assessment
Lesson 01 – What is Performance-Based
Assessment?
One of the prominent advocates of
performance-based as an assessment tool design is
James Mcmillan (2018). According to him,
performance-based assessment involves a
student’s acquisition and performance of a skill or
competency in creating a product, constructing a
response, or making a presentation. He continued
in saying that the term performance is shorthand
for performance-based or performance-and-
product.
A rudimentary definition of performance
assessment offered by projectappleseed.org
(2018), a recognized organization known for its
advocacy of performance assessments, states that
a performance assessment should allow students
not only to acquire knowledge and skills but at the
same time it must be coupled with the process by
which the students solve problems.
Performance-based assessment are better
tools for describing the thought processes and
metacognitive strategies used by a learner or the
abilities with which learners reflect upon,
evaluate, and monitor their own learning
processes, as a necessary condition for learning
and intellectual development – (Chatterji, 2003).
Author Chun, 2010 advocated reserving
performance assessment for those learning targets
that require skills, products, and some forms of
reasoning. The most important determiner for
using performance assessment is the nature of
learning target.
Chun seems to find support from Hilliard
(2015) when he wrote that performance-based
assessments are fundamental in accurately
measuring the majority of course standards and
they are characterized by being authentic, process
and product-oriented, even open-ended and time-
bound. Frey and Schmitt (2010) state that
“performance tests measure skills or ability; are
sometime called alternative assessments or
Alternative, Authentic and Performance-Based
Assessment
The term performance-based assessment is
synonymous with performance assessment.
Performance assessments are also sometimes
referred to as “authentic assessments” or
“alternative assessments”. But the terms are not
interchangeable. The alternative assessment
highlights the contrasts to traditional paper-and-
pencil tests while authentic assessment
emphasizes the practical application of the tasks in
real-world settings.
Educators, commonly teachers that are
assessing the learners of students and are
advocates of performance assessments sometimes
prefer the use of authentic assessments (because
the assessment tasks more closely coincide with a
real-life, non-school task) or alternative
assessment (because such assessments constitute
an alternative to traditional, paper-and-pencil
tests) – Phopham, 2014.
Portfolio Assessment (which is also
considered as an alternative form of assessment),
on the other hand, is also a particular types of
performance-based assessment but should not be
considered a synonymous descriptor for the
performance-based approach.
Why Use Performance-Based Assessment
According to Chatterji (2003), the
constructivist movement in cognitive psychology,
concerned with how the learners actively construct
meanings about this world, hold the idea that it is
beneficial to assess both the processes and
products of learning through applied activities.
We must recognize that the “achievement”
domain could be made up of two kinds of learning
outcomes – process and product outcomes.
Characteristics of Performance-Based Assessment
 Students perform, create, construct,
produce, or do something.
 Deep understanding and/or reasoning skills
are needed and assessed.
 Involves sustained work, often days and
weeks.
  Calls on students to explain, justify, and make problems more engaging for students, and
defend. help the teacher evaluate whether a student who
 Performance is directly observable. can solve a problem in one context can solve it in
 Involves engaging in ideas of importance another. Hence, it is desirable to increase the
and substance. authenticity of tasks to whatever extent possible.
 Relies on trained assessor’s judgments for
scoring.
 Multiple criteria and standards are
prespecified and public.
 There is no single correct answer,
 If authentic, the performance is grounded
in real world contexts and constraints.
Why Performance-Based Assessment
As with any other method, performance
assessment can be constructed and used well or
poorly. This method has seen a resurgence of
interest due to several reasons as stated in the
figure below.

Real-life learning from the learner’s

Authenticity of Performance-Based Assessment
Performance assessments need to be
authentic. An authentic assessment involves a
direct examination of a student’s ability to use the
knowledge that is likened to what is encountered
in a real-life setting (Mcmillan, 2018). The goal of
authentic assessment is to enhance the learning
process and help students gain knowledge while
completing tasks that are beneficial to their “real-
world” experiences.
Grant Wiggins (1998), clarified the
characteristics that would tell if an assignment is
authentic. According to him, a task or an
assessment is authentic if it has the characteristics
as shown in the figure below.
Based on the facts below, authenticity is,
obviously, a matter of degree. Although
authenticity is usually approximated, it is an
important goal of performance-based assessment
(Mcmillan, 2018). Providing realistic contexts can
perspective is often playful, recursive, and
nonlinear, engaging, self-directed, and meaningful
(Mccombs & Miller, 2007). These authors
maintained that school learning experiences
should prepare learners to be knowledge
producers, knowledge users, and socially
responsible citizens. And it is assumed that these
are enough reasons to prove that authenticity in
performance-based task is of great significance in
learning.
Guidelines to Constructs Well-Designed
Performance-Based Assessment
It is significantly important that
performance based assessment should be well
constructed. Gallagher (1998) gave the following
steps in designing a performance-based
assessment. We are going to use these steps for
the initial phase of developing a performance-
based task.
 Determining the Purpose
The first step in designing a performance-
based assessment is determining the purpose for
which the results will be used because the purpose
drives other decisions in subsequent steps in the
process.
Chatterji (2003) in his book identified
some of the specific purposes that can be used for
classroom assessment. They are as follows:
1. To identify student needs before the
beginning instruction,
2. To set instructional goals.
3. To plan or improve instructional
strategies.
4. To place students in temporary
instructional groups.
5. To track student growth.
6. To communicate expectations
students, to motivate students.
7. To diagnose students strengths and
weaknesses.
8. To provide coaching and feedback to
students.
9. to provide a basis for grading/marking
involving:
a. Criterion-referenced approach
b. Norm-referenced approach
c. Combination of the two.
10. To communicate student progress to
parents.
11. To make decisions on student retention
or promotion.
Process-Oriented and Product-Oriented
Performance-Based Assessments
Process-oriented performance-based
assessments measures the ability of students to
perform tasks that corresponds to important
instructional objectives. In many areas,
achievement is expressed specifically through
student’s performance and then measures the
skills involved while such performance is ongoing
and being observed.
Process-Oriented Learning Competencies
In the second step of the design process,
the one who will do it must determine the form
and substance of the performance assessments.
Clearly defined instructional outcomes
(objectives) are the backbone of a good
performance-based assessment and it may
incorporate one or a meaningful cluster of
outcomes from one or more disciplines
(Gallagher, 1998).
to
Learning competencies can be stated as
instructional objectives, learning outcomes, or
learning targets to others.
The learning objectives in process-oriented
performance-based assessments are stated in
directly observable behaviors of the students
(Santos, 2007).
Competencies are defined as groups or
clusters of skills and abilities needed for a
particular task just like what (Gallagher) had
stated. A competency is said to be more complex
when it consists of two or more skills.
Designers of performance-based
assessment tasks usually ask the following
questions to guide their initial selection of
objectives as enumerated by Borich and Kubiszyn
(2000):
What kinds of essential tasks,
achievements, or other valued competencies am I
missing with paper and pencil tests?
What accomplishments of those who
practice my discipline (historians, writers,
scientists, and mathematicians) are valued but left
unmeasured by conventional tests?
Product-Oriented Performance-Based Assessment
Performance-based assessment can be an
assessment of product. Products for performance-
based assessment are completed works that
include most of the characteristics needed for a
good and authentic performance test (Linn, 2000).
The emphasis is on the student’s ability which is
expressed through a product such as completed
paper, project, or solution.
Product-oriented learning competencies
The rules for designing product-oriented must be evidence-based that the student has
performance-based assessment tools overlap achieved the competence required of the
considerably with the guidelines in designing submitted products or projects. In some tasks, we
process-oriented. However, consider the could emphasize both process and product
following recommendations that are offered by outcomes during an assessment, such as in the
Chatterji when developing product-oriented tools. “use of a writing process (process outcome) to
compose a story (product outcome).” If both the
1. The product-oriented method should be
process and product are valued parts of the
a justifiable match for the targeted content,
curriculum, we might have to decide as to whether
behaviors, and conditions in the domain.
we wish to assess both or just one of the two
2. The assessment conditions, prompts, targeted outcomes.
and directions must clearly define the product
expected of students. Constructing Performance-Based Tasks
3. To achieve reliability, an adequate Mcmillan (2007), suggested that once we
number of products or work samples should be have identified the learning targets and have
gathered. decided that a performance-based assessment is a
method we want to use, these three steps remain.
4. Well-designed scoring rubrics must
accompany product-oriented assessments.
Product oriented learning
targets/objectives
as a learning target, each product needs to be Description of performance-based tasks
clearly described in some detail so that there is no
The tasks can vary by subject and by the
misunderstanding about what students are
level of complexity. Some performance tasks are
required to do. Mcmillan (2007) said that one
specific to a content area, while others integrate
effective way to do this is to show examples of
several subjects and skills.
completed projects to students
The performance-based task needs to be
specified and clear to students so that it meets the
criteria for good performance-based assessment.
This is accomplished by preparing a task  Role playing
description. The purpose of the task description is
to provide a blueprint or listing of specifications to
ensure that the essential criteria are met, that the
task is reasonable and that it will elicit desired
student performance. The task description is not
the same as the actual format or wording of the
question that is given to students; it is more like a
lesson plan. The task description should include
the following:
 Content and skills targets to be assessed.
 Description of students activities.
 Group or individual help allowed.
 Resources needed.
 Teacher role.
 Administrative process.
 Scoring procedures.
Once the task description is completed and we
are satisfied that the assessment will be valid and
practical, we are ready to prepare the specific
performance-based task question.
The task design has no specific format. It
depends upon the teacher to decide on how the
task can be more authentic, creative and
challenging just like the following examples,
Mcmillan (2007) adapted the following example
of a performance-based task prompt:
Task Design on Graphing Skills:
Take note of how the authenticity of the
graphing skills had been established by the task of
recording the average daily temperatures.
Where it utilized the GRASPS model
where g-goal, R- role, a-audience, S- situation, p-
product, and s-standard. Standard stands for the
scoring criteria
Another way of coming up with a task
design is through the RAFT model where R- role,
A- audience, F- format, and t-topic. This time, we
will use our product-oriented example no. 2
Other ways of task designing are provided
to help you in designing your process-oriented and
product-oriented performance-based tasks.
 Emergency task
 Description tasks
 Sequence task
 Persuasion task