Not since the development of the objective paper and pencil test early in the century has an assessment method hit the American educational scene with such force as has performance assessment methodology in the 1990s. Performance assessment relies on teacher observation and professional judgment to draw inferences about student achievement. The reasons for the intense interest in an assessment methodology can be summarized as follows: During the 1980s important new curriculum research and development efforts at school district, state, national and university levels began to provide new insights into the complexity of some of our most valued achievement targets. We came to understand the multidimensionality of what it means to be a proficient reader, writer, and math or science problem solver, for example. With these and other enhanced visions of the complex nature of the meaning of academic success came a sense of the insufficiency of the traditional multiple choice test. Educators began to embrace the reality that some targets, like complex reasoning, skill demonstration and product development, "require"--don't merely permit--the use of subjective, judgmental means of assessment. One simply cannot assess the ability to write well, communicate effectively in a second language, work cooperatively on a team, and complete science laboratory work in a quality manner using the traditional selected response modes of assessment. As a result, we have witnessed a virtual stampede of teachers, administrators and educational policy makers to embrace performance assessment. In short, educators have become as obsessed with performance assessment in the 1990s as we were with the multiple choice tests for 60 years. Warnings from the assessment community (Dunbar, Kortez, and Hoover, 1991) about the potential dangers of invalidity and unreliability of carelessly developed subjective assessments not only have often gone unheeded, but by and large they...
