A TRUE TEST - TOWARD MORE AUTHENTIC AND EQUITABLE ASSESSMENT

This April 2011 article is a reprint of the original May 1989 (V70N9) article and includes a new one-page introduction (on page 63 of this issue) by the author. The problem of assessment in education persists, the author maintains, because we have not yet properly framed the problem. We need to determine what are the actual performances we want students to be good at, he urges, define authentic standards and tasks to judge intellectual ability, and then design a test that measures the performance. The article focuses on the authentic test, which is a contextualized, complex intellectual challenge, rather than a collection of fragmented and static bits or tasks.