Performance standards define a student’s academic responsibilities and, by implication, the teaching responsibilities of the school. How do we determine whether students have lived up to their academic responsibilities? We assess their work—is it “good enough” by comparison with the standards.

Assessment is an integral component of the educational process. If properly designed and administered, assessments can provide important information to help guide and inform instruction. In order to perform these functions, there must be a strict alignment among standards, educational strategies and resources, and assessments. That is, what we assess must be what we teach, and both must focus on what we want students to know and be able to do—the performance standards.

Assessment takes place in a variety of formats and situations, but a convenient distinction separates informal, ongoing classroom assessment from formal, standardized assessment. The former consists of the evidence teachers collect in class on a continuous basis to track the progress of their students in mastering the skills and material that are taught. The latter are the tests and on-demand assessments administered to all students in specific grades as part of the city- and state-wide assessment programs. Both types of assessment are essential to effective instruction. Ongoing classroom assessment provides continuous feedback on student progress to students, teachers, and parents; standardized assessment measures the mastery of critical skills and concepts at key developmental milestones. Regardless of their differing perspectives, both classroom and standardized assessment must be fully aligned with the performance standards.

The state and city have begun a collaborative process to redesign their standardized assessment programs in English Language Arts based on the performance standards. (See the figure below.) Beginning with students who entered ninth grade in 1996, all students will be required to take the Comprehensive Regents Examination in English to meet graduation requirements. The Regents Examination itself will be revised to better align with the new performance standards. To ensure that all students are prepared for the state’s new commencement standards, the city and state are restructuring the standardized assessment systems in the elementary and middle school grades. The new assessment systems include a variety of components that are designed to measure attainment of the new standards at the key milestone grades 4 and 8, as well as to track student progress toward the attainment of the standards in previous and intervening grades. To complete the assessment system, the city is instituting an Early Childhood Literacy Assessment System (ECLAS) which will guide and provide feedback on instruction in grades K - 3 to support the system’s goal of literacy for all students by grade 3.

Beyond standardized assessment, it is equally important to ensure that the performance standards provide the focus for ongoing classroom assessment. In the absence of standards, teachers are left without a common frame of reference to determine whether the work of their students is good enough. Standards could vary widely from classroom to classroom resulting in wide variation in instruction and achievement. The work samples that form an essential part of the performance standards provide graphic guidance to all teachers in assessing the level and quality of their students’ work.

How the assessments are connected to the performance standards
The performance standards define a domain of expected student performances. Take the Reading standard at the elementary school level as an example. This standard begins with a definition of reading that describes what we expect students to be able to do at approximately the end of fourth grade. The performance descriptions go on to spell out expectations for what students will accomplish in terms of the quantity, quality, range, and concentration of their reading. Furthermore, students are expected to put their reading to work and the standards say so; students have to produce work based on their reading of specific types of text.

We assess the different elements of the domain defined by a standard by using assessment methods appropriate to the expected performances. Although the assessment system that will fully align with the performance standards is currently under development, several of the components are already in place. The assessment methods comprise a variety of on-demand standardized and ongoing classroom assessments.

The standardized assessments are of two types that differ in format, method of scoring, and the information they provide. One type of assessment serves the purpose of telling us how well students are performing in comparison with standards (standards-referenced assessment); the other compares student performance to that of representative samples of other students (norm-referenced assessment). Typically, the former are performance-based assessments that require students to produce work that is rated by teachers or other professionals using a rubric, or scoring criteria, based on the standards. The latter are usually multiple-choice in format and are machine scored.

In the new city- and state- assessment system, these two different types of assessment are used to complement one another. Performance-based assessments are combined with multiple-choice tests in ways that measure both the depth and breadth of student achievement. Moreover, beginning in 1999, the state will eliminate its Pupil Evaluation Program (PEP) tests in reading and writing and replace them with assessments that align with the performance standards and articulate with the city assessments. This will allow for the elimination of duplicative testing.

The components of the new standardized assessment system in reading and their relationship to the reading performance standard are described below.

The CTB reading test
Students’ understanding of content and form, as well as their ability to identify an author’s purpose and to apply their background knowledge, are major components of reading comprehension in today’s classroom. Students must be able to integrate these skills and processes with more traditional skill components such as vocabulary and usage. The performance standard in reading describes these higher-order skills that define the quality and level of performance expected of students.

CTB Reading assesses all these skills and processes at the same time as it measures students’ ability to understand continuous prose. Test items focus on constructing, evaluating, and extending meaning skills defined by the performance standards.

Also consistent with the Reading standard, the test reading passages represent a broad cross-section of writing styles and types. Variety allows us to assess students’ strategies for acquiring meaning from various kinds of texts. The passages capture student interest and reflect today’s literature-based curriculum. Non-fiction selections include newspaper articles and biographical sketches. Informational essays on a wide variety of subjects are balanced with fictional passages from classic, traditional, and contemporary writers.

The non-fiction selections develop ideas clearly. The fictional passages represent our multicultural population with excerpts from folktales, myths, poetry, plays, and historical fiction. Authors include classic and modern writers such as: Maya Angelou, Isaac Asimov, Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Sandra Cisneros, Elizabeth Coatsworth, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Frost, Lois Lenski, Carl Sandburg, and Amy Tan.

Each passage begins with an introduction that establishes a context for reading, provides a smooth transition, and encourages students to apply their background knowledge. Test items for each passage appear in a logical order designed to help students construct meaning. The items target theme, purpose, central meaning, or application of skills in a different context, requiring students to infer, analyze, interpret, predict, and transfer knowledge. Tasks take many forms, from selecting the best title for a passage at the lower levels to extracting and applying major concepts at the upper levels. They require students to think about what they’ve read—not merely to recall facts and details.

Performance Assessment in Language Arts (PAL)
The performance standards stress the importance of reading and writing as integral parts of Language Arts. The Performance Assessment in Language Arts (PAL) measures both. PAL uses the unique abilities of performance assessment to measure student behaviors involved in constructing meaning from written text. Many of the activities in PAL also assess student performance in writing content and writing mechanics.

The PAL performance assessment tasks in reading are based on the interactive theory of reading. They are structured to reflect a hierarchy of skills. First, students demonstrate their initial and global understanding of a text. Going back to the text, they develop an interpretation and more detailed knowledge. They are asked to reflect on the text and show how it might link to their own experiences or those of other people they know. Finally, they are asked to evaluate and critique the text.

In the PAL assessment, students read two thematically linked passages. They may be two stories with differing styles, a story and a poem, or a story and a non-fiction magazine article, or another combination. Each passage has a brief introduction that gives students a context for their reading and focuses their thinking on the theme of the passage. The students read the first passage and respond to several items based upon it. They then read the second passage and respond, first to items based just on that passage, and then to items that require them to link the two passages. This structure allows students to demonstrate both comprehension and critical thinking skills at a level consistent with the performance standards.

All items in PAL require students to generate individual responses, rather than select a response from a list of choices. Students may be asked, for example, to write a letter to one of the characters, create an entry in a journal, or write one or two paragraphs to the teacher. Other items consist of a variety of graphic organizers that students fill in to demonstrate their understanding of the passage. The items are scored by New York City teachers, who are given extensive training in scoring. For all items, the scorers use clear, explicit rubrics that have been provided by CTB/ McGraw-Hill in collaboration with the New York City Board of Education.

Most items in PAL require students to write extended responses that are scored for writing content and writing mechanics as well as for reading comprehension. Scores in writing content are based on evidence of students’ ability to focus on the topic or task, to address the specified audience, and to present complete ideas in logical order. Scores in writing mechanics are based upon students’ competence in capitalization and punctuation, spelling, grammar, and word usage. Sample student responses (known as anchor papers) are provided to assist staff development, giving teachers experience in objective scoring of performance assessments as well as deeper insight into the goals of the performance standards. Thus, teachers are given examples of student work for scoring PAL in the same way that student work is used to exemplify the performance standards.

Classroom assessment
The first part of the Reading standard (a) requires that students read at least twenty-five books or book equivalents each year. The reading must include a range of literary forms and works from several writers. Students are also required to read in depth (b). The appropriate assessor for these requirements is the teacher or another adult close to the student who can verify the student’s claims for meeting this requirement. This component of the system for assessing achievement of the Reading standard is designed to work like a merit badge in the style of the awards developed by the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. and the Boy Scouts of America.

Raising standards for all students has important implications for the quality of curriculum and instruction. Indeed, one of the most important reasons for setting high standards is to challenge the system to perform for the students. Appropriate assessments based on these high standards can give the system feedback on how well it is doing and what it has to do next.

Aligning assessments with the performance standards
In order to ensure that New York City’s assessments are aligned with the performance standards, we will engage in an ongoing process of mapping our assessments against the standards in terms of content and level of student achievement required to meet the expectations set out in the standards. The assessment system will be modified and updated until full alignment is achieved. It is expected that this process will take place over several years resulting in successive annual improvements in the match between assessments and the performance standards.