Getting Past the Eye-Candy Test with Elementary Assessment Data

You can call it the “eye-candy test” problem.

It may not be as pronounced in education as it is in baseball. However, in almost every conversation I have with school district administrators we work with, they are focused on this core challenge: How can we make sure our data – not through some anecdotal perception or observation -- supports our decisions about how to improve student performance?

Brad Pitt played Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane in "Moneyball" a story about how the baseball team began using data to try to level the playing field with more profitable teams in the league.

When the concept comes up, I picture the scene in the movie “Moneyball” that depicts Brad Pitt – who plays general manager Billy Beane -- getting fed up with how his old-school baseball scouts are trying to identify the best players so their cash-strapped major league team can compete with the richer teams like the New York Yankees.

“He passes the eye-candy test. He's got the looks. He's great at playing the part. He just needs to get some playing time,” one scout says, while another questions the same player’s confidence because of how good-looking his girlfriend is.

Those more anecdotal observations could be important as a piece of the puzzle, but if you focus on that, decision-making becomes too arbitrary, which is the point of the book and the movie. Statistics and data add so much more.
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Performance Based Assessments

Some of the districts we talk to ask us about performance-based assessments, if we have clients that use them, and how successful it has been. It seems that performance based assessments have been around for a long time but districts have a difficult time implementing and grading them. We do, in fact, have some clients that are successful with this type of assessment. The key to this success is in assessment management process.

So let’s answer some questions:

What are performance-based assessments?

Performance-based assessments are an alternative to traditional multiple choice assessments. They are “designed to encompass a better overall representation of student progress including the effectiveness of teacher lesson plans, worksheets and study skills. The idea with performance-based testing is to gather a demonstration of the scope of knowledge a student has on a subject rather than simply testing the accuracy of their response on a selection of questions.” - http://www.teach-nology.com

Why implement performance-based assessments?

Some believe that the traditional methods of testing do not accurately measure student knowledge so these methods are not the best indicator of student performance. Performance-based assessments can, therefore, be used to supplement the testing process and encompass a wider range of performance criteria measurement.

What makes this difficult to implement?

The difficult part of managing performance-based assessments is in the time it takes to grade the assessments for large classrooms as well as how to grade the assessments in the most objective manner possible.

That leaves us with how do teachers successfully manage performance-based assessments in the classroom? -- They implement a rubric grading model. Now this can be a manual or an automated process. For our clients, we use an automated process where teachers can build and reuse rubrics that connect to their curriculum and assessments. Other districts use a paper-based process where teachers manually create the rubrics. The automated process obviously saves more time but both help the teacher to objectively grade their assessments.

Here are some additional resources related to rubrics and performance-based assessments:

Performance Based Assessment | teAchnology
Why Rubrics? | teAchnology