“Portfolios are much better than tests. We have to know more and be able to explain it. It’s not just a one-time thing. It’s harder, and it really helps us learn.”
Student from Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School
What Students Need
In addition to rethinking curriculum and pedagogy, redesigned schools take more meaningful approaches to assessment, which begins with clarity about what students should know and be able to do when they graduate and continues with opportunities to develop, refine, and exhibit those skills in authentic ways that reflect how knowledge is used in the world outside of school.
The modern workplace requires students to demonstrate well-developed thinking skills, problem-solving abilities, design strategies, and communication capabilities that cannot be assessed by most currently used multiple-choice tests. Performance assessments—widely used around the world and increasingly sought in the United States—allow students to demonstrate their knowledge more fully by directly exhibiting a skill, reporting on an investigation, producing a product, or performing an activity. By measuring students’ abilities to apply knowledge to solve pertinent problems, such assessments encourage and support more rigorous and relevant teaching and learning. This approach is both essential to deeper learning and motivating for students.
Research shows that students who regularly engage in such assessments do as well on traditional standardized tests and better on tests of analytic and performance ability than other similar students; they are also better prepared for college. Teachers who regularly use and score such assessments also learn more about how their students understand the material and have developed applied skills, as well as about the standards embedded in the assessments. They are better able to teach to the standards and student needs and to design their own inquiry projects and assessments, which deepen learning opportunities.104
Key Practices
Clear and Meaningful Expectations
Effective schools have clear and meaningful expectations for students that relate to what they need to learn for a healthy and productive life. Over the past 2 decades, an increasing number of schools, districts, and states have adopted what is known as a Graduate Profile, which answers the question, “What do we want students to know and be able to do by the time they graduate?”
Graduate Profiles reflect the knowledge and skills students need to be college and career ready in the 21st century and to meet the challenges our society will face in the years to come. These standards often include ambitious academic goals, critical thinking and problem-solving skills, communication skills, skill in new technologies, cultural competence and multilingualism, creativity, emotional intelligence and leadership skills, and growth mindsets. Graduate Profiles provide important guideposts that students, families, and staff can all understand.105
Once the goal is established, the school’s faculty determine on a more detailed level what is essential for their students to know and be able to do, making principled choices about what is most important—that is, what ideas and skills are central to the discipline, are transferable to other contexts, and allow students to gain access to other ideas and skills. This kind of discipline in choosing material to study is necessary when one understands that students learn more from in-depth study of concepts that they evaluate and skills they apply to new situations than from a cursory overview of many topics.
Performance Assessment
Once a school is clear about what students should know and be able to do by the time they graduate, the next question that arises is, “How will we know if we are succeeding?” That question is best answered by looking at student work as the concrete representation of progress toward the standards. As a result, student work is the focus of the school: Student writing, artwork, and other projects are displayed prominently throughout the school to demonstrate this commitment to placing their learning at the center of the school’s mission. Student work is also the subject of much teacher and student discussion and analysis. Students have frequent opportunities to engage in serious conversations about their work and to share, reflect upon, and receive feedback on their progress. As teachers look at the work of their students, they learn much more about what is working as they had hoped and what is not than they could learn from scores on standardized tests. And as they look at the work of other teachers’ students, they have a window into the curriculum and teaching strategies used in other classrooms.
These conversations about the quality of student work best occur in the framework of a well-crafted performance assessment system that more fully reflects what students should learn and be able to do.106 Performance assessment systems are based on common, schoolwide standards; they are integrated into daily classroom practice; and they show students what they will need to do by providing models, demonstrations, and exhibitions of the kind of work that will be expected of them. They are used to foster learning and continuous improvement, not as a way to push out students or set ambitious goals and allow students to fail. Generally these systems include:
- portfolios of student work that demonstrate in-depth study through research papers, scientific experiments, mathematical models, literary critiques and analyses, arts performances, and so on;
- rubrics that embody the set of standards against which students’ products and performance are judged;
- oral presentations (exhibitions) by students to a committee of teachers, peers, and others in the school to test for in-depth understanding and assess the student’s readiness for graduation; and
- opportunities for students to revise their work and improve in order to demonstrate their learning and meet the standards.
Students develop their portfolios over time with the support of their teachers. Class assignments are designed to meet the portfolio requirements and are judged using the same rubrics. Students revise and improve the work they have done in class, often during advisory time and with the help of their advisor or other classroom teacher, to prepare it for inclusion in the portfolio. Many high schools not only have a graduation portfolio that students prepare in their last 2 years but also 9th- and 10th-grade portfolios or projects that focus instruction and help students learn how the process of developing and exhibiting complex projects works.
Beyond statements of expectations, effective schools provide common frameworks for how students can achieve them. This may take the form of common “habits” that describe and help students acquire the cognitive and social-emotional abilities they need to do well in school. (See Feature 2: Safe, Inclusive School Climate.) These habits may require students to weigh and use evidence, address multiple perspectives, make connections among ideas, evaluate alternatives, and assess the value of the ideas they have studied, as well as to present their ideas clearly and effectively. These habits, which are an essential part of a deeper learning curriculum, are consistently reinforced across classrooms through the use of common assessment rubrics. Whether a student is working on a literary analysis paper or a mathematical proof, their teacher is assessing their work with similar questions, such as: “Did you provide evidence? Did you consider alternative perspectives or approaches? Did you adhere to the conventions of the discipline?”
When students graduate, they leave with a portfolio that they carry proudly, because it represents the work they have done over multiple years; it represents who they are, what they care about, and what they have learned; and it means much more than a test score. Portfolios are not just evaluation instruments; they are complex learning experiences as well as opportunities to reflect on the learning journey.107 Students in schools that use portfolios consistently report that the portfolios help them learn more. One New York City high school student explained: “You get to do most of the thinking when you work with your portfolio. You have to explain in detail how to do something or why something is important, so that someone who doesn’t know it can understand it.” Another student said: “When you take a test, you don’t feel like you need to know it after it is done. The portfolio sticks in your brain better.”108
School Supports
The data gathered through an effective performance assessment system help teachers hold themselves accountable and improve their practices. As one New York City teacher put it, “Portfolios are a key way into individual work with students, to see what’s working and what’s not, and what we need to do better.”
Student assessment is a learning tool, a tool for guiding progress, not a method for sorting students into successes and failures. At too many schools today, people say, “We know we have high standards because so many students fail to meet them.” This is actually an example of low standards for the educators in those schools. Having high standards for young people means having high standards for adults in their work with young people, as educators work together to create a wider range of strategies to meet student needs. Standards and assessment cannot be separated from curriculum and instruction. Teachers help students achieve by constructing the pathways to success with careful scaffolding and opportunities to iterate.
Joint curricular planning among teachers is needed for curriculum and assessment to “add up” to these expectations throughout the school—to build ideas and skills from one course to another and from one year to the next. This enables more powerful learning than can be achieved with a fragmented, disconnected course of study that leaves students with gaps, holes, and misunderstandings as they try to put the pieces together by themselves. Teachers and students alike understand that everyone is heading toward the Graduate Profile. (For more on common planning, see Feature 7: Well-Prepared and Well-Supported Teachers.)
Performance assessment networks can also support school learning. A growing number of high schools—and some districts—have developed their own assessment systems to support deeper learning.109 The New York Performance Standards Consortium has supported dozens of high schools in implementing a portfolio assessment system with a waiver from state Regents exams since the 1990s, having demonstrated stronger college performance from students experiencing this form of deeper learning and rigorous assessment.110 These schools share common expectations for project work in each core discipline and use the same rubrics for assessment, and they calibrate scoring within and across schools.
In more recent years, a California Performance Assessment Collaborative has emerged, serving a wide range of schools across the state, along with districts such as Oakland Unified School District, which requires a capstone project of all seniors; Pasadena Unified School District, which requires a graduation portfolio; and Los Angeles Unified School District, which features graduation portfolios in all of its Linked Learning high schools (about one quarter of all high schools in the district). A study of these systems found that they expanded opportunities for students to demonstrate deeper learning competencies—including improved communication and presentation skills; greater confidence in college and career preparation; and growth in social-emotional skills such as perseverance, creative problem-solving, and a growth mindset. It also found that teachers reported an increased focus on alignment among curriculum, instruction, and assessment across subjects and grade levels; continuous reflection on and improvement of their instructional practices; more positive relationships with their students; and closer collaboration with their colleagues.111
Similar collaboratives in New England and Hawaii join states like New Hampshire, Oregon, and Washington, which have long designed and supported local performance assessments. The College Board has integrated project-based performance tasks in many of its courses—including the AP Research course , the capstone AP Seminar , and the AP Computer Science course—evaluated as part of the final score, and has announced it will spread the practice to its other courses over the next few years, as evidence shows that students are more successful both in the courses and in college as a result of these experiences.112
Another aspect of using assessment for learning is being thoughtful about how to use data. Teachers and school leaders today have access to huge amounts of data about their students, and in many schools a lot of time is spent in meetings talking about data, with no real impact on student learning. Effective schools are clear about which data they look at and why. Even with a quality performance assessment system, educators can sometimes become overfocused on rubric scores and miss important information that explains why students may be struggling. Data can also be used to help teachers understand those factors that support success. They can then incorporate those factors into their teaching.
Educators Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan113 have introduced a framework that helps educators stay focused on which kind of data to use for which purposes:
- Satellite data: Lagging indicators (such as standardized test scores, attendance rates, graduation rates, teacher retention, etc.) can be useful for longer-term strategic planning.
- Map data: Formal school- or classroom-based data (such as analysis of student work and scores on performance assessments or other school-level math assessments, information from student or staff surveys, etc.) can be used to understand trends in a more nuanced way.
- Street data: Qualitative and experiential data (such as interviews with students, fishbowl discussions or student feedback groups, shadowing a student, structured classroom observations, etc.) tell us what works for students.
It is easy to overfocus on satellite-level data, which can tell educators which students are succeeding and which are not (often revealing opportunity gaps), but which do not provide a solution. Map-level data, especially student work, can provide a better diagnosis of the problem. Yet frequently the path forward to improving student performance is found through careful attention to street-level data, where teachers listen deeply to understand the student experience and then make the necessary adjustments to allow all students to succeed, which is what authentic assessment with supports enables.
Effective schools devote significant time and resources to teacher professional development that is linked to student learning. If performance assessment results indicate that a teaching team is struggling to support their students in a particular area, those teachers carefully analyze student work and then engage in peer observations and other street data collection to understand what is getting in the way of student success. Schools may also engage students themselves in this process, inviting students to observe teachers and provide feedback. These cycles of inquiry can then lead to a collaborative schoolwide effort in which the faculty develops collective ownership of a pedagogical framework—a set of common practices that is effective in supporting their students to meet high expectations. (See profile of June Jordan School for Equity in Feature 7: Well-Prepared and Well-Supported Teachers for an example of such an effort.)
Such schoolwide goal setting and shared public assessment of both students’ and teachers’ work convey valued ideals in concrete ways. They provide occasions to recognize and celebrate student and teacher work, and they make clear the areas in which more work is needed. The public nature of these processes is an important incentive for teachers not only to prepare individual students well but also to work to improve their overall teaching. When done well, assessment becomes a learning tool for everyone in the school community.
School Profile: Student Portfolios at New York Performance Standards Consortium and Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School
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