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The use of educational testing in the United States has been criticized for its inequitable effects on different populations of students. Many assume that new forms of assessment will lead to more equitable outcomes. Linda Darling-Hammond argues in this article, however, that alternative assessment methods, such as performance-based assessment, are not inherently equitable, and that educators must pay careful attention to the ways that the assessments are used. Some school reform strategies, for example, use assessment reform as a lever for external control of schools. These strategies, Darling-Hammond argues, are unlikely to be successful and the assessments are unlikely to be equitable because they stem from a distrust of teachers and fail to involve teachers in the reform processes.
Darling-Hammond argues instead for policies that ensure "top-down support for bottom-up reform," where assessment is used to give teachers practical information on student learning and to provide opportunities for school communities to engage in "a recursive process of self-reflection, self-critique, self-correction, and self-renewal." Ultimately, then, the equitable use of performance assessments depends not only on the design of the assessments themselves, but also on how well the assessment practices are interwoven with the goals of authentic school reform and effective teaching.
In recent years, the school reform movement has engendered widespread efforts to transform the ways in which students' work and learning are assessed in schools. These alternatives are frequently called performance-based or "authentic" assessments because they engage students in "real-world" tasks rather than multiple-choice tests, and evaluate them according to criteria that are important for actual performance in a field of work (Wiggins, 1989). Such assessments include oral presentations, debates, or exhibitions, along with collections of students' written products, videotapes of performances and other learning occasions, constructions and models, and their solutions to problems, experiments, or results of scientific and other inquiries (Archbald & Newman, 1988). They also include teacher observations and inventories of individual students' work and behavior, as well as of cooperative group work (National Association for the Education of Young Children [NAEYC], 1988).
Much of the rationale for these initiatives is based on growing evidence that traditional norm-referenced, multiple-choice tests fail to measure complex cognitive and performance abilities. Furthermore, when used for decisionmaking, they encourage instruction that tends to emphasize decontextualized, rote-oriented...