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Alternative Assessment-Based Strategies

Measuring students' proficiency in meeting health education curriculum standards is best accomplished through performance assessment strategies. Performance-based assessment focuses on capturing what all students, independent of learning style, know and can do. And just as important, performance-based assessment makes the learning process directly applicable to students' lives in ways that are both challenging and motivating.

The National Health Education Standards focus on both content and skill development. Knowledge and skills are developed when classroom instruction requires students to engage in meaningful learning opportunities in which they apply concepts and practice skills in activities that are relevant to their personal lives. Performance-based assessment allows students to demonstrate their ability to integrate the knowledge and skills they have acquired.

What is Performance Assessment?

Performance assessment items make students think, rather than regurgitate a correct response. For example, a multiple-choice question or a direct question that has a single correct answer merely ask students to show what they know... or don't know. In contrast, performance assessment items ask students to create a response that reflects what they know and can do.

Performance assessment items include constructed responses and performance tasks. A short constructed response requires a student to write a paragraph or two in response to a prompt; an extended response requires students to respond to a prompt with an essay, chart, or diagram. A performance task is a more time-consuming project embedded within the curriculum that students complete within the classroom or on their own. They may complete a performance task alone or as a member of a group.

By creating performance-based tasks that represent real challenges for students and reflect the real world around them, this assessment approach makes classroom activities directly relevant to students' lives and are therefore intrinsically motivating.

Grading Students' Work

Since there are no simple right or wrong answers in performance-based assessment strategies, the best way to score students' work is through the use of rubrics. The CCSSO-SCASS Health Education Assessment Project (HEAP) uses two four-point rubrics to score students' work: one rubric addresses skills while the other addresses content. Students' work is scored with a "4" for content if the response is...

...complex, accurate, and comprehensive, showing breadth and depth of information; relationships are described and conclusions drawn.

At the other end of the rubric, student work earns a "1" if the response...

...addresses the assigned tasks but provides little or no accurate information about the relationships between health concepts.

Using Backward Design

The best way to integrate performance assessment into your health education teaching is to adopt the principles of backward design developed by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe. Backward design uses a three-step process to integrate performance assessment and instruction:

1. Identify desired results: what should students know, understand, and be able to do?
2. Determine acceptable evidence: what do students need to do to show they have achieved the desired results?
3. Plan learning experiences and instruction: what instructional activities are needed to help students achieve the desired results?

Backward design is known as "teaching with the end in mind." Employing the principles of backward design can help you to develop performance-based assessment strategies that are aligned to your state's health education standards. To learn more about backward design, see the October issue.