Measuring what matters most : choice-based assessments for the digital age /

Thirty years ago reaction to A Nation at Risk (1983) prompted educators to narrow most elementary and secondary school curricula to emphasize what would be tested. There have been a number of reactions to "measurement-driven instruction." "Authentic assessment" argued that traditional paper-and-pencil testing emphasized skills that have little value once formal schooling ends. Schwartz (Stanford Univ.) and Arena (co-founder, Kidapt Inc.) have developed this criticism further by suggesting that assessment procedures focusing on knowledge reference a static and, inevitably at some point, obsolete objective. The goal should be to assess the choices that students make since it is their choices that will define what they will learn, how they will proceed, and how persistent they will be in the learning activity. In common with other champions of authentic assessment, they shun that "dark priesthood of assessment makers who pray at the altar of psychometrics." In the process of democratizing assessment, however, they fail to address the questions that psychometrics emerged to deal with; how does one demonstrate that measures of students' choices in fact measure students' choice, for example. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduate collections and above. D. E. Tanner California State University, Fresno