As a music educator, I prefer performance-based assessments, sometimes also referred to as authentic assessments. Performance assessments offer an opportunity for students to demonstrate their learning in a real-life situation rather than writing an answer on paper or filling in a bubble sheet. For students to excel on performance-based assessments, students need to show a complete package of learning and use the upper levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. On written assessments, they need only to be able to express their thoughts with pencil and paper. However, Wiggins (1998) stated the value in using multiple types of assessments because not all students excel at performance-based assessments (as cited by Mueller, 2018). Students who have high anxiety in completing tasks in front of a group or even just a teacher can more accurately show their learning through a written assessment.
While Newmann & Welhage (1993) concluded that authentic assessment allows for more student learning than traditional assessments due to the connection to real-world experiences, there remains a place for traditional assessments in education. Traditional assessments with open-ended questions allow for critical thinking even though this method of assessment is not project-based. I find these types of assessments to be “middle of the road” between authentic assessment and multiple-choice assessments. They often do not require as much work or independence as authentic assessments, but they require more skill and critique than multiple-choice tests. In open-ended assessments, students need to be able to critically analyze information to formulate appropriate answers on open-ended questions. Open-ended assessments generally contain questions that require the student to use middle to upper levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
While selected-response assessments, otherwise known as multiple-choice tests, are my least favorite types of assessment, they also serve an important purpose. They allow for large-scale, consistent testing of students across many geographical areas and many contents. If created correctly, multiple-choice assessments can contain questions that require higher-order thinking skills. However, many educators do not agree that multiple-choice questions involve higher-order thinking and that students can simply guess the correct answer (Frehat & Smadi, 2014). I tend to feel the same way. Even if multiple-choice questions are designed to require higher levels of thinking, students can still guess the correct answer, skewing the perception of what students have learned.
References
Freahat, N. M., & Smadi, O. M. (2014). Lower-order and higher-order reading questions in
secondary and university level EFL textbooks in Jordan. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 4(9), 1804-1813. http://www.academypublication.com/issues/past/tpls/vol04/09/07.pdf
Mueller, J. (2018). Why use authentic assessment? Authentic Assessment Toolbox.
Newmann, F. M. & Welhage, G. G. (1993, April 1). Five standards of authentic instruction.
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