Gwyneth Boodoo and William Mehrens, measurement specialists, talk about the difficulty of making inferences regarding student abilities when using performance assessments. Excerpted from The ABCs of School Testing (Joint Committee on Testing Practices, 1993).
Boodoo:
"If we want to measure problems...and arithmetic, we like to see exactly how the student will solve the problem. We like to be able to trace the steps a student follows. However, we cannot measure a large number of tasks like this because of the time involved."Mahrens:
"As long as one simply wants to know can the student do that particular task, that is not a particular challenge, but at other times, one wants to infer from a small sample of tasks to a large area, and that is harder to do with performance assessment than with multiple choice testing because there are far fewer samples or what we might call test questions in performance assessment."
Date posted: 1995
