• Educators are aware of principles and indicators for student assessment systems.
• Educators fully understand the purposes for assessing and the fair inferences that can be based on different assessment tools.
• Educators know and take advantage of methods for maximizing fairness in development, administration, and scoring of alternative assessments.
• Educators, parents, and community members value alternative assessments for providing useful information about how students are performing, and for providing information on how to refine and individualize instruction for better results, unlike the information provided by secured tests.
• The views of all stakeholders--including teachers, administrators, curriculum experts, assessment experts, parents, and community members from diverse cultural groups--are represented when assessment strategies are planned, selected or developed, and administered.
• Assessment systems are tied to curriculum and instruction to ensure that all students have adequate opportunity to learn the material that is to be assessed in ways and modes that are culturally relevant and contextually based.
• Multiple assessment tools are used whenever the assessment is intended for high-stakes purposes.
• Educators interpret and report assessment information and use the results with caution, understanding that inferences made from assessment tools are only as good as the curriculum and instruction that they are intended to support.
• Educators recognize that assessment is only one facet of reform initiatives. They acknowledge that quality assessment must be teamed with improved pedagogy and ongoing professional development in curriculum and instruction.

ACTION OPTIONS: Because the use of alternative assessment--including performance assessment--for high-stakes purposes is relatively new, there is still much debate about the appropriate standards for technical rigor, and practitioners and researchers are still exploring methods for maximizing equity. Although ensuring fairness in performance assessment remains a challenge, some procedures are available to help increase equity in alternative assessment. In addition to applying statistical techniques such as differential item functioning (DIF) analysis, which is used with standardized tests to determine item bias, educators can take the following actions to help ensure the building of a performance-based assessment system that will address high standards and achieve equitable outcomes.

When planning assessment systems, educators can:

• Tightly couple new assessment systems with other concrete reforms necessary for closing performance gaps between ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, and gender groups. These reforms include the following:
  • Providing professional development efforts aimed at raising teachers' expectations for all children's performance.
  • Ensuring equal curriculum content and coverage in all classrooms.
  • Identifying the students' roles and responsibilities for their own learning. (Refer to the Critical Issue "Working Toward Student Self-Direction and Personal Efficacy as Educational Goals.")
  • Developing and enforcing classroom-level standards for opportunity to learn.
• Obtain broad-based support for the assessment system by involving everyone who has a stake in educating and supporting students. Encourage assessment experts, curriculum experts, teachers, administrators, and professional developers to form a planning group for assessment strategies.
• Ensure that members of the planning group come to consensus about their purposes for assessing and recognize the need for multiple assessment tools that together converge on an understanding of student performance.
• Be aware of gender bias and fairness in testing.
• Create policies that allow for the blending of professional development and assessment monies so that curriculum, instruction, and assessment can be aligned for all children.

When developing, selecting, and administering alternative assessments, educators can:

• Follow guidelines for equitable assessment.
• Involve students in designing performance tasks. Pilot tasks with students and conduct think-alouds (by which students share the stages of their thinking process or the reasoning behind their actions) to provide illuminating information regarding how students of diverse ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic backgrounds interpret and respond to tasks.
• Use strategies for developing equitable performance tasks.
• Involve individuals who can shed light on different cultural interpretations of performance tasks before the assessments are developed and used. Evidence (Miller-Jones, 1989; Garcia & Pearson, 1994) suggests that performance differences lie not only in the task but also in how individuals interpret tasks. The content as well as response parameters of tasks may privilege one ethnic or socioeconomic group over another.
• Conduct sensitivity reviews with representatives from each ethnic and language group for whom the assessment is intended.
• Select performance tasks that are clearly aligned or connected with material that has been taught.
• Provide students with choices for performance tasks, materials, and response modes. Such choices increase opportunities for students to capitalize on their prior knowledge and increase their motivation to perform. However, educators should be aware that all students are not equally good choosers and, as with other skills, may need to be taught to choose wisely.
• Pinpoint the exact skills or processes (such as group dynamics, language understanding, English usage, or math reasoning) that are being measured in each performance task. Because performance tasks are complex, they often require multiple operations.
• Provide students with carefully designed scaffolding activities to build a common base of prior knowledge within the class. If used appropriately, cooperative group activities may be used to help all students---not just those with enriching home or community experiences--understand foundational concepts or ideas necessary to perform well on a task.
• Allow students lots of opportunities to experiment with classroom versions of the performance task--written both as assessments and as instructional units.
• Allow for accommodations and adaptations to the assessment for second-language learners, particular cultural groups, and students with disabilities.
• Use analyses such as differential item functioning (DIF) analysis to determine test-item bias.
• Keep a record or log of the instructional strategies by which performance tasks are presented to diverse students. These strategies can include scaffolding and accomodations and adaptations to the assessment.
• Use portfolios and observation scales to assess student progress. These assessment tools are sensitive to progress over time and allow students the freedom to demonstrate culturally based experiences and knowledge.
• Ensure that the performance criteria are explicit and clearly understood by each student.

When interpreting, scoring, reporting, and using assessment results, educators can:

• Participate in consistent and ongoing professional development to ensure proficiency in interpreting and scoring alternative assessments.
• Use multiple methods for estimating rater reliability. For high-stakes assessment, it is important to have someone other than the students' teacher judge performance. However, in order not to lose the critical educational benefit of the classroom teacher's knowledge and understanding of his or her own students, schools can experiment with auditing systems that include both familiar and unfamiliar raters.
• Make sure that the assessment report highlights not only the gaps but also the specific aspects of the assessment system on which students of diversity perform well. (For example, portfolios can show significant growth patterns in written expression and reasoning.) This coverage is imperative, because what is reported shapes expectations.
• Report opportunity-to-learn variables (such as time spent on direct instruction of high-order cognitive processes, use of culturally responsive instructional techniques, library and resource use, and opportunity for advanced-placement courses) along with performance data. Comparing the performances of groups of students without providing this contextualizing information can lead to erroneous inferences. It also is counterproductive, because it does not give teachers and schools information about concrete steps needed to improve performance.
• Interpret and report assessment information to parents and the community.

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