Study On Student Performance Assessment

Assessment drives the curriculum, instruction and even the whole education. What to be assessed? How to assess? The answers reflect what educational results we are seeking. On the contrary, the educational results we are seeking will determine what to be assessed, and how to assess. However, the difficulty in reality is that we hope to cultivate the high-level talents with innovative spirits and integrative abilities, while our assessment system tends to narrow the view of talents. The students they called talents are those who are only good at learning by rote and accumulate, while the admiring talents in the modern society such as high-order thinking skill and innovative application is marginalized.The study bases on such a hypothesis, there is not best assessment but the most suitable one. It is suitable or not depends on how the assessment aligns with the assessment goal and studying objects. There is another hypothesis. Because assessment drives the curriculum and instruction, an assessment system can improve teaching and learning can't be developed, until the assessment has penetrated the curriculum and instruction. For a long time, the traditional pencil-and-paper test is dominating the assessment, some important learning results can't be detected, further more, it brings negative effects to teaching and learning. Therefore, we need a balanced assessment system, we need performance assessment, which can detect complicated learning results and improve the teaching and learning.Based on above hypothesis, this study will be carried out around four problems, includes why we need performance assessment? what is performance assessment? how to develop performance assessment? and how to apply performance assessment to improve teaching and learning ?The rise of performance assessment in 20th century due to people's dissatisfaction with the standardized tests, due to the great negative influence on education. People try to focus on performance assessment's application in assessment reform, to support the systematic reform and improve instruction, curriculum and the students' learning. The characters of performance assessment bring its advantages as following, it can get the result that objective paper-pencil tests can't get, it can improve the integration of curriculum standard, instruction, learning and assessment, and it can improve the students' learning.In fact, performance assessment isn't a new thing in recent years, it can be tracked back 2,000 years ago. But it is a kind of reconstruction and rebuild on the base of the theories of learning, cognitive and assessment. Today's performance assessment has brand new connotation and new look at the background of new era and new theory. After summarize the past study results, we can define performance assessment as in a real situation, apply scoring rubric to judge the students' performance or results during they accomplish a complex task. There are three factors in this definition, the first one is that the application of knowledge and skill is in the real situation. The second one is, to testify their learning process and result, the students must find ways to solve the problems independently. The third one is the assessor assess according to the scoring rubric which is designed in advance.The process to develop performance assessment is also the process to define assessment goals, design performance tasks, and develop scoring rubric. The goals that can align with performance assessment is those need persisting understand, combine various intellects, and belong to complicated studying fields. It's necessary for us to base on a certain method and strategy to analysis the standard, and define the clear and specific goals. Performance assessment must match assessment goals closely, and must inspire the students' special performance, so the evidence of students' performance will be collected. The performance that the scoring rubric describe must relate to the standard and must align with our expectations. Meanwhile the description can tell the assessor what characters and symbols they should seek, and how to assess the performance according to the rubric designed in advance.Performance assessment can not only aim at formation but also aim at summary. Performance assessment has great advantages in formative application. Firstly, it can improve the integration of curriculum standards, instruction and assessment. For the relation between performance task and curriculum standards is symbiotic, the performance tasks are also teaching activities, and the rubric is the curriculum standards' embodiment. Secondly, performance assessment can provide descriptive information of the teaching and learning to teachers. For rubric provides detail guide line, but we can't judge students' performance with simple grade and marks, we should use languages to describe their performance. Thirdly, invite students to join assessment, advocate their self-leading study. Rubric provide a clear view of the object, they can find out their advancement, judge their achievement, monitor their development, and become the master of learning. Performance assessment has been applied widely in for summative purpose, even play a role in some high-stakes assessment. From the successful implement of the graduate portfolio assessment of New York Central Park East Secondary School in American, and centre-assessment coursework in Britain college entrance examination, we are convinced that performance assessment can be available in summative assessment. Although the decision of summative assessment mainly depends on the proof from paper-pencil tests, the increase of the perspectives of curriculum object( knowledge and skill, process and method, affective attitude and value), the change of the structure of curriculum( Comprehensive Practical Activities such as Research-based learning appears in national curriculum plan ), The reform of High School and College entrance examination system( comprehensive qualities assessment and University independent enrollment), all above changes impel performance assessment become an inevitable trend.There is no best assessment, but the most proper assessment, as any other assessments, performance assessment has its limitation, too. Subjectivity, impartiality, high cost and the teachers' assessment literacy will be the problems that need further exploration.