Three Components of Performance Standards

Borthwick and Nolan (1996) describe the three components of performance standards:

Performance descriptions. These distill the content standards to identify what is essential and what is able to be assessed. (Content standards commonly include expectations that cannot be assessed validly or reliably, such as "develop a love of reading.") Content standards that may run to several pages are thus reduced to a succinct set of statements of what students should be expected to know and be able to do.
Samples of student work. The performance descriptions are matched with samples of student work that have been judged to illustrate the quality of work expected to meet the standard at a given grade level.
Commentaries on student work. The student work samples are accompanied by commentary that explains how the student work illustrates the quality required to meet the expectations set out in the performance descriptions.