y finding examples of student achievement that illustrate those different levels of proficiency. Once performance is defined, strategies must be devised for sampling student work so skills or products can be observed and evaluated. Examinees might be presented with structured exercises to which they must respond. Or the examiner might unobtrusively or opportunistically watch performers during naturally occurring classroom work in order to derive evidence of proficiency. When structured exercises are used to elicit performance, they must spell out a clear and complete set of performance responsibilities for examinees. In addition, the examiner must include in the assessment enough exercises to sample the array of performance possibilities in a representative manner that is large enough to lead to confident generalizations about examinee proficiency. And finally, once the desired performance is described and exercises have been devised, procedures must be spelled out for making and recording judgments. These scoring schemes, sometimes called rubrics, help the evaluator translate judgments of proficiency into ratings. The assessment developer must select the level of detail to be reflected in records, the method of recording results, and who will be the observer and rater of performance. SOUND PERFORMANCE CRITERIA Quellmalz (1993) offers a set of specific guidelines for the development of quality performance criteria. These reflect important aspects of skill demonstration that judges are to look for and evaluate--they represent important attributes of quality products. They are devised through a thoughtful analysis of samples of high quality performance and comparison to samples of inferior performance. Out of this comparison come an understanding of the keys to academic success in the context for which the assessment is designed. Quellmalz advises us that criteria should: be significant, specifying important performance components; repre...
