I've not a long history in

my career working with performance tasks including work at the state level in
Maryland where during the 90s the state of Maryland developed statewide
performance assessments the only format we had on our state assessments for nine
years were performance-based assessments he had no multiple choice items on our state test we learned a
tremendous about
about the design and use of performance assessments in a large-scale testing situation but for me as important
was
the impact that those performance tasks had on teaching and learning my own two children went through
Maryland schools
during that era and I saw the impact on what they were learning what assignments
they were doing what homework they were doing and so forth and it helped me appreciate the fact that goodrich
performance tests are much more than just something you do at the end of teaching to get a grade they become a
focus and purpose for teaching and they give relevance and meaning the students
for their learning I then transition to directing something called the Maryland assessment
consortium which was a state-level project in which teachers from all
around the state of Maryland came together in summer workshops to design performance tasks and associated
rubrics
applied to at the time Maryland State Standards the performance tests were not
summative assessments however they were meant to be rich learning activities and formative assessments so
again I learned
a lot about the design and use of performance attack performance tests
along the way I've written four books that feature emphasis on performance assessment and then as some of you
know
and as Adrian mentioned I co-authored the understanding by design series are with mannequins so I give you
this
background only to say I feel eminently prepared and qualified to share with you
some ideas around design and use of performance tests so let's look at the
the outline of our webinar for the next 48 minutes I want to address a couple of
key topics the question why use performance tests and I suspect you of
an appreciation for this because you signed up for this webinar I want to take a look at the characteristics or
features of effective performance tests some ideas for designing authentic tasks
and then share some useful resources with you so that's a look at the
overview of the content that I will present in terms of process I'm going to
insert periodically during our time together something that I call a pause
I'm going to plan it for about two minutes and the pause will give you an opportunity if you're viewing this with
other people to summarize what for you are key points add your own thoughts how
does this idea this example relate to your work or what ideas come to mind if
there are questions that come up from something I say or some of the examples you could bring your question
up to
others in your group and discuss if you're viewing the webinar by yourself
take the two-minute pause as an opportunity to reflect on the ideas you just heard but also if you have comments
or questions you can record those in the chat box and I will do my best to respond to questions even either
during
the flow of the webinar if that seems appropriate or I'll reserve some time at the end to address questions that
have
come in alright I have a little bell which I will use hopefully you can hear
that from where you're located when you hear the bell it's a signal just to wrap up conversations that you might
be
having with others during these periodic pauses all right and we'll use the pause several times during this
webinar
so let me jump right into the first question so what is a performance test I
take a straightforward definition on the screen and and on your handout I believe
you have me a performance task is any learning activity or assessment that
asks students to actually perform with their knowledge there is to apply their
knowledge in some context with some purpose foreman's tasks typically yield
a tangible product that may be written it may be visual it may be multimedia or
technology-based and/or a tangible performance it could be oral to begin
aesthetic etc so it's producing something performance tasks can be
simply rich learning experiences and or they can be used for assessment we can
assess what students do in other words so often people think of performance
assessment tasks only and my contention is we should think about assessment
apart make performance tasks more broadly they can be used as assessments they can also be used as a focus of
rich
learning activities and I think the best task can do both so why use performance
tests there probably a lot of reasons we could cite but I'm gonna highlight two the first is it's my contention that
we
need authentic performance tasks in order to focus on the most important
learning outcomes of schooling outcomes that are embedded both within our academic standards and also those
outcomes that cut across subject or discipline areas such as 21st century skills or habits of mind second purpose
is the tasks I believe had the potential to support meaningful engaged and
ultimately enduring learning so I want to focus my remarks and examples in this
webinar on those two purposes let me begin by
looking at outcomes of value I'm going to start by looking at some within
academic subject areas these are driven largely by standards be they national
standards in the u.s. like common core or state or provincial standards such as
the new British Columbia curriculum or Australia national curriculum for
example so when we look at standards or outcomes in academic areas
my recommendation is don't fixate too narrowly on grade-level standards only
because the grade-level standards are often very specific and up in discrete
and therefore the lots of them what I encourage teachers and curriculum teams
to do is to step back and look at the bigger picture look at the opening pages
of standards documents in fact I propose do a close reading if you will of the
opening pages don't with a highlighter and highlight what the opening pages say
are the goals of the standards in the long term why are we teaching these
things what do we want students to be able to do in the long run and those goals or outcomes are often stated
very
overtly in the opening pages I propose that that's what we want to keep as a
focus the grade level standards are often more specific and they might be
seen as the building blocks or the longer performances but we want to keep
the end in mind in other words so let's look at just a few examples and think about these goals
or outcomes as the focus for designing performance tasks in various grades so
on the screen is one fairly straightforward we want students to be able to write for various purposes
different genres and for different audiences and situations now you might
say well yeah that's a goal it's a broad goal my response is as it should be it's
a long-term goal or it's like an anchor standard if you're familiar with League common core
standards but if we plan backward from this particular writing goal it suggests
to me that at every grade level even down into the primary grades we want to
have opportunities for kids to write to inform explain create an argument to
persuade and as they get older maybe more sophisticated genre like satire or
informational guides or technical manuals for examples of to long term
goals in mathematics these are derived
from standards we want students to be able to address messy problems in math
you know what I mean by that be a messy problem he's not one in which you often
see in math textbooks where if you've memorized the algorithm and plug in the night the right number if you
get an
answer that's really not a problem that's a Destin exercise a problem by
definition is something you don't know what to do when you're initially confronted with it that calls for
mathematical reasoning using strategies checking to see if your answer is reasonable and indeed involves the
disposition or habit of perseverance because good problem solvers keep at it
and you're struggling with a messy problem they don't give up right away if we were to say as part of a school
district mathematics curriculum that we want students to get better at problem solving in this way it suggests
that we
build performance tasks that are messy that a real world like and that involve
reasoning and persistence and then we teach kids to do these with the math
they're learning a team struggle here's an example of performance goals for
history and social studies
find these statements at the beginning of history and social studies standards
but they are sometimes misunderstood or
maybe you've not even recognized when we get into the grade-level standards that tend to focus on more
specific content
about historical periods this is not to say that historical content is unimportant it is to say would suggest
that women teach content of history through the lens of these larger ideas
looking at patterns of history and how they play out at the present critically appraising historical things as two
examples and so having goals like this suggest which performance task
possibilities summarize every subject has such long term goals they are
performance based and that they specify what we want students to be able to do and they become a corporal
point for the
creation of or the selection of rich performance tasks my reading of the
standards modern standards from various sources tell me quite overtly this is
what the standards are calling for in virtually every discipline those of you who are familiar with the next
generation science standards in the u.s. you've read the opening pages an excerpt
is on the screen we know that this is what they're saying message of NGSS is
we want to be teaching for conceptual understanding of cross-cutting concepts
and core ideas we want to be in embracing mat the science practices of
having kids doing science not just learning facts about science for this
confluence of content based around conceptually big ideas and process or
practices suggest a matrix model where we look at teaching not just marching
through a body of factual knowledge but engaging kids from to understand and apply the practices of
science and it's an intersection of content and practice if you will that
one the basis for rich performance tasks
in addition to outcomes in traditional subject areas we have outcomes that cut
across disciplines on the screen is an interesting graphic and if you haven't
seen this you can go online and just google NGSS commonalities this was put
together by folks at NSTA National Science Teachers Association where they
looked at the big outcomes from three disciplines Common Core English Language
Arts Common Core mathematics and NGSS science and you can see in the center of
the overlapping ovals where common outcomes reside so even if you're not
using common core or next-generation standards it doesn't matter because my
experience is the opening pages of your standards are likely to have many of the same points you can see in the
middle
here m3 or s7 the capacity to develop
support and critique arguments grounded in evidence is an interdisciplinary
outcome of course how scientists engage in argument is not identical to
how historians do but the idea of building and supporting argument of evidence is a commonality therefore if
we want to honor what the standards are telling us we should see regularly opportunities for kids to do
performance
tests involving argumentation another
category of outcomes might be nested under the umbrella of so-called 21st century skills people often refer to
the
four C's critical thinking creativity collaboration on proper rate and
communication as examples such transdisciplinary skills um you
know as an old guy and having been around for a long time I chuckle and I hear the term 21st century skills I
started teaching in the 70s and I had colleagues and myself included we're
trying to teach like these forces so I don't think they're new but I do agree
that in an era where we can Google much of the world's information on a smartphone it makes sense to target
outcomes like these even more importantly than ever before if you
think about 21st century skills these themselves are long-term performance
goals therefore as we build performance tasks to help develop and deepen these
capacities and to assess them we want to ensure that one or more of these these
seas are included those of you who have
looked at some of the research that's been done around employer needs and one
that's on the screen is actually the results of a national survey that's done
with both employers both large businesses and small as well as people
in higher ed where they've articulated the skill set that they are looking for
in employees when you look at the at the
listing including the priority you see these cross-disciplinary
21st century skill types being highlighted so once again we want to
think about creating performance tasks that give us evidence of these
capacities that are growing across the grades and students as well as paths
that would help students develop and practice these capabilities by showing
you this slide I want to go on the record is not trying to make the case that the only purpose of school is
preparing kids for jobs I certainly don't that I think there are many important outcomes of schooling that
transcend
guest job preparation but I do agree and as the parent of two 20-somethings
who've seen many of their friends not be employable in at least the fields of
their their choosing because they didn't have the sufficient skill set I do
believe that preparing these kinds of skills is important of albeit certainly
not the only purpose for schooling so I'd like to take a pause now and give
you a chance just to think about what you've heard and or jot down questions or discuss with your group mates
what do
you think about what I've discussed thus far the idea that the important outcomes of schooling within subject
areas as
well as some that cut across subject areas are really performance-based outcomes and therefore need to be the
focus for performance tasks so two-minute pause
though I'm going to interrupt your cogitations or conversations and take a
look at its next chunk what are the characteristics of rich performance
tasks let's look at several um maybe
unnecessary but we're worth nonetheless pointing out that a performance task
calls for performance we're generally these tasks require students to apply
their learning here is an example of an application task that involves a science
investigation or upper elementary grade students
this task students are asked to apply their understanding of scientific methodology at a basic level to your
conducting while planning in this case an investigation now you could have them just plan the investigation if
you are
using this as an assessment to see if they understood aspects like control
variables or can make it more authentic you could actually do this task and actually conduct the investigation
but
my point here is that performance tasks are application oriented you have to do something with your learning
not just
get back what you've learned second characteristic good performance tests
are open-ended implying that they typically don't have a quote single
correct answer or there are some tasks that have a good reasonable answer but
there's not a single way of going about the task but they may be open-ended both an outcome and or in process
here's an
example of a performance test built for the study of a state in the u.s.
although it could be a state in Australia or South Africa or a province
in Canada or the study of a region or a country so have a look
hopefully you can see that this isn't open-ended to ask there's not a single correct answer there's not a single tour
that one might plan in fact part of the intent is for students to have to think
about the key historic geographical economic and cultural aspect of their
state or their region and decide what are the most important and then to think about the sequence of the itinerary
and
notice that the task is more than just you know drawing lines through a map you
have to explain why you've chosen your particular sites and the logic behind
your itinerary now I'd like you to think about this also as not simply something
that we do at the end of a study of a state or a province or a country or a region think about this as being
presented to students right in the beginning there was they're learning about Pennsylvania or New South Wales
or
Manitoba they are thinking about the acure and I propose that having a worthy
performance test that comes at the end in fact help students learn remember
synthesize and make sense of some of the particulars along the way third
characteristic important to me and I suspect many of you we want to create tasks that are interesting that are
relevant for students we do that by presenting a context that's that's
authentic that reflects what people do outside of school and also that's novel
in the sense that it's not just a task that they've done before ten times and
it's just kind of formulaic or Road it requires thinking because you're
confronted with something different does it context with the task this leads
me to show you the visual that's that's now on the screen this visual can be
thought of from assessment or instructional point of view but the
outer ring is reflecting assessments if we look at all of the assessment types that
teachers use we have a whole range of formats and types we have tests that
might be given at the end of a unit or the end of a course we have quizzes that are shorter in scope that we might
use
along the way if we have skill checks to check on or assess the developing proficiency of
skills including basic skills we have observations that would be used in
subjects like physical education primary grades teachers are great kid watchers
um and these assessments are used to gather information about learning subset
of all the assessments that we use our performance task performance tasks
involve application and yield a typically of the product or performance but think about it a performance test
could be dribbling a basketball in PE or tinier shoe in first grade or
kindergarten it could involve diagramming a sentence in fifth grade
but when it is not all Forman sees are necessarily authentic they may be
subsets of authentic opponents by dribbling a basketball is not the same as playing the game in the inner oval is
a smaller set of tasks that are truly authentic they're set in an authentic realistic context they have constraints
of the sort that people outside of school face time limits budget constraints they are working for a
particular audience etc and my belief is that the best tasks are not only
authentic not only involve application but they call for transfer of learning
and thus can be used to assess understanding there in another way how
do we know students really understand the content they're running well to me the best evidence of
understanding is
stifling students can apply their learning to a new situation in an
authentic situation where they have to and just to fit the context that to me
is the best measure of understanding and therefore is a rich assessment of understanding via application now the
proportions in the graphic are also meant to suggest that we don't necessarily do authentic performance
tasks all the time there are other assessment types that are used and there
are other purposes involved as well but I am suggesting that we want to work
toward authentic performance tasks as a subset of all the assessments used or
more generally all the learning activities here's another example of a
performance task in mathematics five to the content of area and perimeter
the test presents students with an authentic real-life situation in which area and perimeter is used
I think authentic cash also helps teachers answer a question that you
often hear from students especially as they go up the grades why do we have to learn this stuff forever uses this
framing the content you teach around authentic tests should help answer that question in fact the tasks should
reveal
how people outside of school apply the things we're learning the motivational
aspect in other words often people's fourth characteristic alluded to a
moment ago is something I want to make more overt formins tasks give us
evidence not only of basic skills or basic knowledge but the ability to
transfer your run and thus give evidence of understanding think about it rote
learning we're lonely enable a student to give back what was told them and the way it was told you really want
to see
if they understand the content have them apply it in the context of an authentic
situation and explain it and that will give us evidence of cue understanding
not just surface knowledge here's a short but very interesting high school
mathematics task tied to a unit on statistics with a focus on measures of
central tendency mean median and mode notice the clever cast of this teacher
design
I love this example on the teacher who gave it to me told me that when he announced this that he would allow
the
students to choose their method for grade calculation for that marking period their interest in learning need
median mode went way up so that's another aspect of authenticity trying to
create a sadhana not only authentic to how people outside of school use knowledge and skills that
sort of real-world authenticity but authentic to the interests and experiences of students best tests are
inherently interesting to them and they want to work on the test because in this case it's in their interest so let me
wrap up this segment before a pause by suggesting an analogy think about the
authentic tasks as like the game in athletics or the play in theatre the
game is authentic you have to prep everything together that she worked on in practice knowledge of the game
the
individual skills of playing the game and also understandings otherwise known
as strategy you have to put all that together on the field or on the court or
on the ice the game is an authentic performance it involves transfer right
and that every game is different how the other team lines up may be different than what we practiced and the
team has
to adjust encouraged can't come out and play for you it has to be done by the players if you think about
performance tests as the game we want kids to be able to play with knowledge skills and understanding we can
then
plan backward from the game - in fact develop our practices of the
equivalent of lessons in teaching and in our lessons we're going to have the game in mind forgiving the kids we
have with
the players on our team we're going to determine what will they need to know to play the game well what skills
do we
have to develop and what strategies are important to good performance this gives
us the context for teaching some of the basics and some of the particulars two
points i want to make with this analogy before pausing first is while the game
requires basics knowledge skills and understanding this developing those in
isolation is insufficient as every coach will tell you coach does something else
to prepare kids for the game and that's often known as a scrimmage what is a
scrimmage a scrimmage is a simulation of the game or game conditions in practice
the difference is that the coach gives feedback to the team and the players so
think of the scrimmage as the best formative assessment to prepare for the
authentic performance that's coming ahead the game I think too often
teachers think if they cover all the basic skills and they had kids learn the rules they're ready for the
game but if they've never been on the field or been on the court and never played the full game they've only
worked
on the component part they're not going to be bored with it then the second and
last point from the moment before a pause is the idea that in coaching coach
doesn't feel that his or her job is to cover the PlayBook play-by-play they
don't think that way they think about the performances in the game what they want their players to be well they
assess where their team is and where individuals are and plan their practices backward from what
they need to do to improve game performance to say to another way having
authentic performance in mind and always in sight I believes helps teachers
prioritize and focus their teaching in a way that's qualitatively different from the teacher who thinks I have to
get
through the PlayBook play-by-play that a coverall you figure out the standard in the order in which they're
listed that's
not our job our job is coaching or performance around outcomes that model
so on that note let's take another pause what do you think of the ideas just her
okay welcome back I'm going to read restart I'm scanning the comments and
questions and one question came in I
like you address right now which is question should performance tasks come
at the end of every unit in my ideal world I say yes any major unit other
than may be very introductory I believe should have at least one performance
task included I agree that in general the task would come ad or toward the end of the unit
but I also have highlight that the practice of presenting the task early in
the unit if not the first day so kids know what they're going to be working
toward because I think this gives them purpose and focus and it provides the
teacher an opportunity like the courage to say now remember what's coming you're going to need to know this
without this
skill in order to be successful or effective I also think that having
performance tests at the end of every unit provides the the potential to have
a portfolio if you will of evidence of students ability to apply their
knowledge my late colleague and best
friend grant Wiggins had a lovely aphorism he said students should
graduate from school with a resume of accomplishment not simply a transcript
of course is taken in a GPA I always love that but the question becomes what
would be in a student portfolio of accomplishment for me a large part of
what would be evidence of their accomplishments would be their performance on rich authentic tasks
however if you're starting out if you haven't done much with performance tasks yet it can be challenging to
design and
implement and score these so don't kill yourself if you're having done much of
this before I wouldn't try to have a unit performance task for every single unit you teach I would think big but
start
small start with one two or three and get comfortable with it get your
students comfortable with the idea and then you can evolve over time for thanks
for your question all right so I'm going to take a look now at the question how
do we design authentic and engaging performance tasks and I have some very
specific ideas to share first of these is drawn from the work that grant
Wiggins and I have done over the years with understanding by design or uvd we
have a fairly elaborate theory of what understanding is and how to assess for
it because our time is limited I'm going to give you a short that practical answer to the question what do we look
for is evidence of understanding simply put we propose that when students can do two things when they can
apply their
learning to something new some situation ideally an authentic context and in
conjunction with applying their learning they can explain it the verb sets that
you see on the screen are examples of the kind of herbs we will have in the performance tasks and they would
involve
these kinds of thinking so we're going to have a test that involved creating a
solution to a problem for taking a flawed experimental design making a
prediction solving a problem raising new questions for inquiry and so forth on
the explanation side we're going to ask students as part of the performance tasks to explain a concept use an
analogy to illustrate teach an idea to somebody else like a younger child or through a museum display we're
going to
incent to justify their answer not just give an answer and so forth if you think
about it we're talking about a simplified version of a doctoral dissertation because in the dissertation
doctoral students have to do more than just identify a research question through their research and write their
thesis are there they have to defend it it's a dissertation and it's defense that shows
that you really understand what you investigated so in a less sophisticated and complex form and as students to
apply and explain if you have performance tests that don't involve
these two dimensions I'm suggesting that it may not be worth the time or effort
second consideration in performance tasks is to ensure that students are
involved with sophisticated in-depth thinking and to that end the depth of
knowledge frame or scale has proven to be a useful design tool now I suspect
many of you viewers right now are familiar with the ok or depth of knowledge but perhaps not everyone so
let me briefly just give a summary there's much information online you can google depth of knowledge and
you'll get
a good tutorial in us in essence dr. Norman Webb developed a four level
taxonomy if you will of the cognitive complexity of tasks or assignments or
learning activities so let me just briefly run through the four levels level one as you can see on the screen
involves the student basically in recalling information or performing a
very simple skill with a one-step skill you don't need much understanding to do
level one test and they're not the focus of performance tasks in my judgment level to involve a little bit more
mental process or operation for instance in mathematics it might be a two-step
problem but it's pretty straightforward and if you know the algorithm and putting the right numbers you'll get
the
answer in reading it for example it would be just getting the gist of the
text you know this text is about X naught any inference or interpretation called for when we get to level three
however we're starting to get in more deeper levels of thinking this is where
we involve involve some strategy some reasoning and reading involves inference
interpretation in mathematics it involves reasoning through more complex
problems that aren't that aren't simple or require more than plugin um level 3
tasks also require explanation support justification as noted a moment ago
level 4 tasks are much more sophisticated these tend to be long term
in nature these are very open-ended authentic and often there are a number
of constraints so these are the very difficult longer-term tasks those of you
familiar with project-based learning I propose that good projects are often at
level four of depth of knowledge these may not be practical for every teacher
who's got a large body of content to cover and or working with younger kids that aren't yet one of the capacities
for these long term in-depth projects so my rule of thumb is when you're creating
a performance task in general you should be focusing on level three
take a moment once again to look at the characteristics here these are what I
believe should be embody
though depth of knowledge is a useful framework and you can use it in part to
look at existing performance tasks that you may be using or maybe on the internet and really make sure that
they
are at least at level three otherwise the juice ain't worth a squeeze you can
put a lot of time into performing tasks but what they're addressing is essentially low-level content or even
rote learning and to me that's not worth the effort
another idea I want to share with you around task design is the use of what I call task frames and I'll give you a
great resource in a moment I'd have a look at the example on the screen
this is a task frame associated with information or expository writing but
you'll notice it's a particularly genre type of writing to it to keep someone
how to do something for the task frame and that you could plug in the
particulars so let me show you an example an elementary classroom actually
here's a here's oh they simplified version of that informative writing
frame this task frame was used by
teachers in an elementary school and this is a little first grader who has
developed a how-to guide in the form of a picture book on something that he
likes to do and knows how to do which is breakdancing I'm the interest or schedule I'm not
going to show the video but he is showing his book step by step guide to
break dancing and then he does an actual demonstration of the of the past or of
the of the skill so that's an example of
a task frame now let's go back to the frame can you envision at a version of
this force a fifth or sixth graders one example I've seen is a fifth grader
developed a tutorial guide for his grandmother to use FaceTime to FaceTime
with them because she doesn't live in the city and you fast forward and think
about a more sophisticated version of this for high school level example create a technical manual or a software
program or video editing program etc
what I like about the test frames as they give structure to test but they also are open allowing
teachers to plug in content skills and even student choice when appropriate for
for example in the first grade case this little guy picked braced dancing where
other first graders picked other things of interest to them so we can build in voice and choice into these tasks
frames
so here's a resource that I highly recommend if you don't already know about this an example is on the screen
this comes from the literacy design collaborative or LBC you can google LDC
org for this google literacy design collaborative and you'll get to their
website extraordinary resource of excellent task they call them test
templates like this these are developed in the US in conjunction with Common
Core Standards for English language arts but if you're familiar with the Common Core they are meant to be
applied in
science and social studies as well now I know that some states either have an
adopted Common Core are pulling back on them for political reasons but I don't
care about that when you look at the task templates you'll see that they are around important outcomes
regardless of
where what state or national body identifies them so this is an example of
a task frame used at the high school level let me show you two examples of
its use here's the first I've been kids examine a current issue
that's being debated in lots of countries not
here's the second example now this is comes from a future of American literature and a unit on American
humorist but it uses it at the same test frame applied to literature
about these test frames and many teachers have told me they like is that the gift structure could the test it's a
line to important authentic and long-term outcomes but if you place to
plug in content you can do this with different works of literature different
audio styles different views on an issue like regulation of drones etc also it
gives opportunities when appropriate for student choice or teacher choice if I
were teaching a unit on humor which I think would be great fun maybe Mark Twain is part of our designated
reading
and course syllabus the Dave berry probably isn't so potentially you could
open up the test it's on the screen and ask students to pick their favorite humorist and compare his or her humor
we
got at Wayne as in the previous example of the drones you could potentially have
kids clicking issue research different points of you come up with their own position
and develop their argument this is rich with 20 per century skills and
application that are valued by people in and outside of school but one more
example of tasks frames it could be applicable in mathematics or science look at the task frame
and here are two examples one from elementary level where in this case a
second-grade teacher had kids measure their Heights every month and over time
not only did they learn the skills of measurement and how to record numbers they got into parts of numbers
because
they don't grow with one inch implement they learned about charts and tables because we need some way of
making sense
of all the numbers were gathering and then it for the end of the year they learned about graphic display of data
and they made growth charts test and involve the kids analyzing their birth
chart and preparing a lesson that they could present to next year's of second
graders we're now in first grade Jek team their growth based on the data and analysis of their birth charts in
second grade that's forward high school level tasks built on the same template
very contemporary
pardon my type typo there I just saw that in each that should be out this is
a real issue and you're having kids investigated but you also potentially
could give them options for how they show or communicate they're learning in different media or different
forms so
let me do one more pause before we wrap up and then I will take questions um here are some design tools
building
tasks that involve application and explanation using depth of knowledge to
ensure that the TAS are at level three not low-level and use test frames such
as those available from the literacy design collaborative as a structure for both building tasks giving teacher and
student choice in the task and building tasks that weaker across the grades and
he had the through lines of performance going from simpler to more sophisticated so two-minute pause before
we wrap up
so um we need to wrap up our scheduled webinar but there are some questions that have come in and I also
want to
share with you one other design tool that preceded the two-minute pause but
it's one that grant Wiggins and I have proposed and written about in our work on understanding by design we
propose
that when you have the essential performance task in mind when and if
it's valuable you can often enhance the task and provide greater authenticity in it by
using a design tool that we call grasps and the graphs frame is on on the screen
in each of the letters in Grasse gets at an aspect of task design grasp
is a frame that you can use to more specifically specify the elements of a
task and there's lots of information examples and understanding by design so
I'm going to wrap up and then address a couple of questions for those of you who can hang on I began the
seminar or the
webinar by talking about the focus on important outcomes of schooling that are
the basis for performance tasks I'd like to end by looking at the second purpose
on the right side which hopefully is evident but I like to highlight a bit
more particularly I'm going to shift to the second of two slides um this is a a
construct that I found useful over the years that identifies factors that often
are influential in student motivation and students willingness to put forth effort on tasks or assignments and the
three categories involve at the left side task clarity students are more
likely to put forth effort if they know the goal if they know the task if they
know how their work will be evaluated or what good work looks like even and if
they are able to see models of good performance so it's not a mystery what they're trying to achieve or they may
not understand the wording of a rubric but they can see the difference between an excellent model and one that's
not so
good my contention is that good performance tasks presented in these
ways provide clarity about tasks and
criteria and when teachers show models of good performance just like coaches
show videos of excellent teams kids understand what quality is and it
becomes a learning target the center column learners are more likely to put
forth effort if they see purpose usefulness and relevance in what they're being asked to learn and to me creating
our curriculum around rich authentic sass helps students see relevance and
when we create contexts that are associated with their experiences or
ones that relate to their culture we can even bring in more kids I believe into the mix and finally the
third column a student's perception of their ability to be at least moderately
successful is also a variable I have seen cases where kids will shut down if
they believe the task is so far beyond them that they can't do it and sometimes
it's it's better not to try or to act up to be distracting from your sense of
inability or worry that you're going to be made to look foolish or stupid if you
can't perform well and this ties to the larger aspect of the kind of teaching
and support needed to help kids do well on worthy authentic tests and finally
the notion of celebrating not only achievement but growth even for lower
achieving students Asha led students non-english speaking students if we can
over time trace their improvement and their growth and celebrate those things
I believe we keep more in the school game and have more ways for kids to be successful without
lowering the bar of standards so I'm going to wrap up with an interesting
action research process that any and all of you could apply if you don't already
and then I'll take a few questions for people that can hang on so my colleagues
grant Wiggins developed an interesting survey that was administered to
secondary school students middle junior and senior high school and they are typically administered at the end of
the
school year most of the survey are selected response format questions but one of the more
interesting ones to me is an open-ended prompt that's on the screen grant asked
students to identify from the whole school year what was the most interesting task project assignment they
had to explain a little bit about it let me leave you with some very
representative comments directly from students in their words
and so grant summarized literally from thousands of these responses the
generalization and you can go to his blog post and read about this if you wish
grant reminds us that the most interesting work and engaging work that students tell us is relevant engages
their thinking links to the larger world and to me rich authentic performance
tasks had these qualities it stimulate and motivate kids to want to do good
work to be engaged with school as well as giving us evidence of their capacity
to apply their learning so that is my
story and I'm sticking to it let me leave you with two resources that
may be of interest I have recently finished a blog series on performance
tasks and there are presently seven blogs posted including a lot of the
ideas that are on this in this webinar but in more detail so you can go to performance tests calm to access those
those blogs and I've just finished a series of online modules that are
nothing like this webinar but a little more detail that are available to you so
I'm going to wrap up with a few responses to a few questions and then I'll turn it back to Adrian for our
concluding comments that okay yes I'm
here okay so proceed and I'll take over when you're done grant I'm sorry okay
okay I'm just scrolling through and one question that Virginia asked was she
said is Asifa the same as a performance task and the the acronym C plus the EPA
is typically used as meaning curriculum embedded performance assessment that's
NEPA and the short answer is yes Virginia I see them that's the same
a number of you have referenced the
relationship of performance tasks to project-based learning and I wholeheartedly agree my daughter Maria
taught at high tech high in San Diego for four years one of the prominent
print preeminent project-based learning schools in the US and I saw firsthand both as an outsider but also as an
insider through my daughter how engaging and rich a project-based learning can be
the main difference I would say is that typically the performance tasks are shorter and scope may or may not be
interdisciplinary whereas most projects are a projects tend to be longer in scope and more comprehensive in
scale
I'm scrolling through and not seeing any other questions so let me turn it back to Adrian and see
if there any questions that you have fielded and otherwise I thank everyone
for attending and I hope that you found this to be useful hour or so thank you
so much grant oh I'm sorry I keep doing that because people are rating on your grant yes so let's see the
questions at
the end yeah there are a bunch and let's see go to
what are the go-to resources for teachers developing performance skills and assessments I think you probably
covered that J well I'll give you one other source which I didn't put in the
webinar but I have been collecting on my website many many resources that support
the design of or or actually that have examples of good performance tasks and
associated rubrics and my website is just my name Jay McTighe comm co m and
you'll find these under resources and websites so I've tried to do a pretty
thorough harvesting of great resources and they're organized by subject areas
as well as some are searchable databases like the literacy design collaborative
so one great source is Jamie Chi comm resources websites that's great
okay so I'm just yeah
another question that that is often asked and it's posed here it's a good one addressed the fears that if we do
these good tasks with students how do we reconcile that with standardized tests that tend to address more
specific
content often in a multiple choice format this is important question I'll
give you a short answer but a well-considered one first of all Mike my
caution is don't conflate assessment format of standardized tests with
cognitive level of demand the pattern that we've seen in the US over the last
15 years is noteworthy state tests 10 to 15 years ago had a high percentage of
items at at level one and two of Dok depth of knowledge but over the last
decade or so many state assessments have been upgraded or revised and a greater
percentage of items are level two and even level three the consortium assessments from PARCC
and smarter balance are also a higher percentage of items at level 3 and so
I'm gonna give you my short answer I don't believe that we should, we would
lose performance on standardized tests we would lose achievement scores or have
them drop if students are engaged in more performance tests on the contrary I
contend that the best prep for standardized tests is not multiple-choice test prep at low levels
but rather teaching for understanding and transfer and giving kids lots of
opportunities to apply their learning but if they understand the content being tested they will do better than kids
who
simply are rote learning their way to higher scores because that doesn't
happen the most widely missed items on state or national tests and you check this out in
your state if you don't believe me the most widely missed items our items that require some degree of inference
interpretation and reading they are multi-step problems in mathematics they require reasoning and if there are
other
subject areas they involve higher-order thinking not just recall again don't let
the format of multiple-choice delude you into thinking they're all low-level
they're not so thanks for the question that was my soapbox answer great and I
agree and I think that if we work with our students and prepare them with a
performance tasks then they've already learned the most challenging things and
should be able to do well on most of the things that they're presented with agreed so J I want to
thank you so much for sharing your experience and your knowledge with us it's been fantastic hugely helpful
the
comments that people have left have been extremely complimentary
and I think that people got a lot out of this so a million thanks I thank you and
triumph learning for sponsoring the webinar and for everyone in attendance great and I'm just gonna end with a
couple of housekeeping details you'll get your certificate tomorrow for those
of you that were here full time or most of the time if you want to if you missed
a lot of this it will be in the assessment for learning community shortly and you'll be able to watch the
recording read the the transcript and also the chat on the side which was very
interesting people are really on on target and on task sharing resources too
and if you take the quiz after watching you will be able to get your C
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assessment for learning community online on ed web so with no further ado we will
be signing off and we greatly appreciate your having been here thanks a million