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The examples in this chapter use the performance expectations and indicators for educational leaders recently published by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO, 2008) as a referent set of standards to illustrate the process of performance assessment design at the leadership program level. This set was selected because the Educational Leadership Constituent Council (ELCC), the Specialized Professional Association for Educational Leadership programs for NCATE, will use CCSSO 2008 performance expectations as a foundation for its seven-year review of program standards and revised ELCC standards are anticipated in 2009. The steps in the assessment design process will be the same regardless of which set of standards or performance expectations faculty are required to use.

The chapter provides specific guidance for completing the six steps in the design phase of quality performance assessment described by Dr. Anderson in Chapter 2. It begins with a description of how to use a two-dimensional matrix to help determine where and how often to assess each standard and provides suggestions for how to address overlapping standards and unequal distribution patterns. The next section presents an example of a performance assessment to illustrate how one develops an assessment activity and identifies the product of assessment. Guidelines for how to develop assessment criteria, write a scoring rubric, and establish evaluation performance standards are then provided. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the evaluation, implementation and program development phases of performance assessment as they relate to design.

High quality performance assessment: the design phase

As discussed in Chapter 2 there are multiple steps in designing a performance activity. The following sections describe the six steps and utilize an example of a performance activity developed at Eastern Michigan University to illustrate the process.

Step 1: decide where the standards should be assessed

The first step in the design process is to determine where and how often priority standards will be assessed. It is helpful to start with an examination of how well the curriculum in place is currently aligned with the expected outcomes in the standards document and then make adjustments where necessary. A matrix is a good tool for critically analyzing how particular outcomes are currently distributed across courses in the program and identifying gaps that may exist.

Table 1 uses Performance Expectation 2 from CCSSO 2008 to illustrate the matrix organization. Regardless of the standards document used, it is important that the items included in the matrix utilize the finest grain descriptions available. Each CCSSO 2008 performance expectation is subdivided into elements and each element includes a set of specific indicators of performance. Since the indicators for the various elements represent the smallest units in the set, brief descriptions of each indicator along with a reference code are listed down the left side of the matrix in the example. The various courses included in the program curriculum are then listed in separate columns across the top of the matrix. In this example, Instructional Leadership and School Improvement are hypothetical classes that deal with topics related to the supervision of instruction and school reform respectively. In actual practice, the matrix would include all of the standard elements and all of the courses required by the program of study.

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Source:  OpenStax, Performance assessment in educational leadership programs; james berry and ronald williamson, editors. OpenStax CNX. Sep 26, 2009 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11122/1.1
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