PERFORMANCE TASK DEVELOPMENT

County Curriculum Leads

October 10, 2014

Why Performance Tasks?

“Performance tasks challenge students to apply their knowledge and skills to respond to complex real-world problems. They can best be described as collections of questions and activities that are coherently connected to a single theme or scenario. These activities are meant to measure capacities such as depth of understanding, writing and research skills, and complex analysis, which cannot be adequately assessed with traditional assessment questions.”

Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium

What is a Performance Task?

“For many people, performance assessment is most easily defined by what it is not: specifically, it is not multiple-choice testing. In a performance assessment, rather than choosing among pre-determined options, students must construct an answer, produce a product, or perform an activity. From this perspective, performance assessment encompasses a very wide range of activities, from completing a sentence with a few words (short-answer), to writing a thorough analysis (essay), to conducting and analyzing a laboratory investigation (hands-on).”

Linda Darling-Hammond & Frank AdamsonBeyond Basic Skills: The Role of Performance Assessment in Achieving 21st Century Standards of Learning

Common Core Smarter Balanced Assessment: What We Know…

• Aligned to College and Career Readiness Standards• Administered during last 12 weeks of school year• Administered to 3rd – 8th and 11th grade students• Assessments will include:

• Computer Adaptive Assessments • Selected Response• Constructed Response• Extended Performance Assessments

7

Structure of Performance Tasks

Performance Tasks and Assessments Give an Opportunity to:Look at assessment differentlyContinue to explore the vision of an improved

assessment programFocus on the role of student work and what

students know and can do Influence the nature and extent of student

engagement with challenging tasksEffect students’ opportunities to learn from and

through task engagement. Reflect and grow professionally, in teaching and learning.

Build a network and support for improving mathematics at the classroom level

Performance Assessment Quality CriteriaStanford Center for Assessment Learning, & Equity

• Clear and Worthwhile Performance Outcomes• Task Focus, Clarity and Coherence• Student Engagement: Relevance and Authenticity• Student Engagement: Choice and Decision-Making• Student Engagement: Accessibility• Curriculum Connected

Grade Level Planning

Sit together with grade level peers to brainstorm content for performance tasks. • 1. Identify the content knowledge and skills to be assessed• 2. Identify the thinking skills to be assessed (Blooms

Taxonomy)• 3. Create a task and the criteria to match.• 4. Develop the criteria into rubrics by adding descriptions of

performance levels.• 5. Try out the task and the rubric. Consider possible student

responses.

Challenges• Careful task design

• Based on a clear understanding of the specific knowledge and skills be assessed and how they develop cognitively, and what criteria defines a competent performance

• Reliable scoring systems• Based on standardization of tasks and well-designed scoring

rubrics, training of scorers, moderation of the scoring process to ensure consistency in applying the standards

• Methods for ensuring fairness• Based on the use of universal design principles, careful linguistic

choices to avoid sources of confusion unrelated to the content being measures, and cultural review of items.

Designing Re-engagement

Performance tasks are a form of formative assessment that use student work and assessment results to inform instruction and design lessons to re-engage students in learning the mathematics.

Re-engagement with Performance Tasks

Re-teaching• Teach the unit/lesson again• Often address basic skills

that are missing• Do the same or similar

problems over• Practice more to make sure

students learn procedures correctly

• Focus mostly on students who are struggling

• Cognitive level is usually lower

Re-engagement• Revisit student thinking• Address conceptual

understanding• Examine task from different

perspective• Critique student

approaches/solutions to make connections; conformation misconceptions

• Entire class is engaged• Cognitive level is usually

higher

Four Steps of Re-engagement

1. Choosing a task and planning to teach it

2. Teaching the task

3. Analyzing student work and planning for re-engagement

4. Facilitating re-engagement with the task

Re-engagement Protocol- Choosing a Task• Choose a complex task or problem that will interest and

challenge your students that offers multiple entry points. • Do the task yourself. Think about it from many

perspectives.• What skills and concepts are students engaging in?• Consider how student might approach the task? • What strategies or skills (correct or incorrect) might they use? • What part(s) will many likely have success with? • What misconceptions might impact their work?

• Think about how to introduce the task and how to support students as they work without reducing the cognitive demand of the task. Write down specific prompts, hints, and explanations or clarifications you might pose.

Re-engagement Protocol- Teach the Task• Provide adequate time, and take care to allow students to

do the bulk of the sense-making, thinking, and work.• Remember that struggle is an important part of learning

and that it develops perseverance.• Monitor student progress and ask questions as needed to

clarify students’ thinking.• Remind students that they will have an opportunity to

revisit the task later.

Re-engagement Protocol- Analyze Student Work & Plan for Re-engagement

• Remind yourself of the standards, skills and concepts that you intended to highlight as part of this task.

• Categorize approaches, strengths and understandings, and errors or misconceptions. Look for variety and for trends. Identify issues to address during re-engagement.

• Choose 2-3 examples of student work to use during re-engagement to address the issues you identifies. Examples may include:• correct solutions that reflect different approaches or explanations• correct solutions that are more or less clearly communicated• incorrect solution(s) that illustrate common misconceptions

• Decide how to structure the discussion around the samples you selected. Prepare discussion prompts that help students make send of the selected work.

• Plan how to support students in revising their own work.

Re-engagement Protocol- Facilitate Re-engagement with the Task

• Review the task and the key standards, skills or concepts you are trying to highlight.

• Establish norms for respectful discussion of student work.• Facilitate the class’s re-engagement with the student work

samples. Use the discussion prompts you planned to help you zero in on the issues you identified to address.

• Have students revisit their work and use what they learned in the re-engagements discussion to make corrections or improvements. Encourage students to add to their original work or write a new copy of the task, but not to erase their original work.

New York City Department of Ed

1. Tasks, Units & Student Work 2. Search Tasks

http://schools.nyc.gov/Academics/CommonCoreLibrary/default.htm

3. Select grade level and subject area

http://schools.nyc.gov/Academics/CommonCoreLibrary/TasksUnitsStudentWork/default.htm

Components

• Unit overview and task description

• Teacher-annotated student work representing a range of performance levels

• Rubrics used to assess student work

• Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles

• Other instructional support materials

Pre-K – 12th gradeEnglish Language Arts/LiteracyMathematicsHistory/Social StudiesScience

ResourcesNew York City Department of Education

http://schools.nyc.gov/Academics/CommonCoreLibrary/default.htm

Engage New York• https://www.engageny.org/resource/spring-2014-regents-ex

amination-ela-common-core-resources

• https://www.engageny.org/resource/spring-2014-regents-examination-mathematics-algebra-i-common-core-resources

Beyond the Bubble

https://beyondthebubble.stanford.edu/assessments

Resources• Georgia Department of Education

https://www.georgiastandards.org/standards/Pages/NETS-S-Performance-Tasks.aspx

• Washington State’s CCSS aligned task bank

http://www.k12.wa.us/SocialStudies/Assessments/default.aspx

• Literacy Design collaborative

www.literacydesigncollaborative.org

Greenwich Public Schools

http://commoncore.greenwich.wikispaces.net/January+30+SBAC-Performance+Tasks+%28g.+K-2%29

Resources• State of Delaware linking documents

http://www.doe.k12.de.us/aab/English_Language_Arts/linking_documents.shtml\

Missouri Department of Elementary & Secondary Education• http://dese.mo.gov/divimprove/assess/sbac.html

http://map.mathshell.org/materials/index.php

• http://www.insidemathematics.org/