Rethinking Performance Assessment

Listen to the interview with Jay McTighe (transcript):

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Imagine a basketball coach spending an entire season teaching players how to dribble, pass, and shoot, but never letting them play an actual game. Instead, at the end of the season, the coach gives them a written test about basketball.

Or what about a theater teacher spending a whole semester teaching students how to memorize lines, project their voices, and move around a stage. Then, rather than performing in an actual play, their final assignment is to create a video explaining the techniques of good acting.

Both scenarios sound ridiculous. But in classrooms, we sometimes do the equivalent. We teach students individual skills and chunks of knowledge, then assess how well they’ve learned them without ever asking them to put everything together in a meaningful performance.

When we want to find out what students have learned, a traditional test can tell us quite a bit. But if we want to know whether students can actually apply their knowledge and skills to solve problems, make decisions, or create something meaningful, we need a different kind of assessment.

That’s where performance assessments, or performance tasks, come in. These are projects and other assignments where students demonstrate their learning by doing something with it, like designing a solution to a problem, developing a proposal, or creating something for a real audience. When designed well, they can give us a much richer picture of what students know and can do. And while many teachers already use projects and other performance-based assessments in their classrooms, a few common design mistakes can prevent these tasks from giving us the evidence of learning we’re really looking for.

This is the problem Jay McTighe addresses in his book, co-authored with Kristina Doubet and Eric Carbaugh, Designing Authentic Performance Tasks and Projects: Tools for Meaningful Learning and Assessment. An educator, author, and curriculum and assessment expert best known for his influential work on backward design in the book he co-wrote with Grant Wiggins, Understanding by Design, McTighe offers practical guidance for creating performance tasks that give students meaningful opportunities to apply what they’ve learned.

On the podcast, McTighe walks us through three examples of effective performance tasks, explains what makes them work, and shares practical guidance for designing our own while avoiding common mistakes. You can listen to the full interview above, read the full transcript here, or get the highlights below.

Performance Tasks Are More Than Just Assessments

McTighe prefers the term performance tasks over performance assessments because he doesn’t want teachers to think of them as something they simply add at the end of a unit to get a grade. Instead, he encourages teachers to plan these tasks from the beginning, asking not just what content they need to cover, but what they want students to be able to do with what they’ve learned.

This also means letting students know early on what they’re working toward. Just as athletes know what game they’re preparing for and actors know what play they’ll perform, students should understand how the skills and knowledge they’re learning will eventually come together.

McTighe wants teachers to think of performance tasks as “rich learning activities and experiences that can build and deepen student learning.” Although they can certainly be used for assessment, he emphasizes that they’re “not simply an end of teaching episode or experience.”

Three Examples of Performance Tasks

To illustrate what effective performance tasks can look like, McTighe shares three examples from different subject areas and grade levels.

State Tour (History and Geography)

Students take on the role of a state tourism advisor, designing a four-day tour that highlights their state’s history, geography, and economic assets. They create an itinerary and justify their choices.

This task places students in a realistic (although simulated) situation, requiring them to apply what they’ve learned rather than simply recall facts. McTighe also recommends introducing the task at the beginning of the unit so students can think about their tour as they learn about the state. “In other words, it will enhance their learning.”

Responsible Citizen (Civics)

Students identify a problem or need in their school or community, propose a solution, and make a persuasive case to someone with the authority to act, such as a principal or city council. They might communicate their proposal through a letter, presentation, or other appropriate format.

This task requires students to apply their understanding of civic participation while also using communication and argumentation skills. It also offers meaningful choices: Students can select an issue they care about, identify their audience, and potentially choose how to present their proposal. As McTighe points out, “One of the factors that motivates students is not only relevance, but the opportunity to work toward their strengths and have some choice.”

Making the Grade (Math)

When studying measures of central tendency, students analyze their own grades and determine whether the mean, median, or mode would produce the most favorable quarterly grade. They write a note to their teacher explaining and defending their choice.

McTighe especially loves this example because it makes an abstract mathematical concept immediately relevant to students. The teacher who developed it reported that students became more interested in understanding mean, median, and mode once they saw how the concepts could affect their own grades. And unlike a lengthy project, this task is relatively quick. As McTighe explains, “You can have authentic — but short nonetheless — rich, relevant tasks that engage learners and can provide evidence of understanding.”

What Makes a Good Performance Task?

Looking at these three examples, McTighe identifies several characteristics that make performance tasks especially effective.

Application and Explanation

According to McTighe, these are the two essential ingredients of a strong performance task: Students need to apply what they’ve learned and explain their thinking. In the Making the Grade task, for example, students don’t just calculate the mean, median, and mode of their grades. They have to decide which measure works best for their situation and defend their choice. Together, application and explanation provide much stronger evidence of understanding than simply recalling information.

Authenticity

Whenever possible, performance tasks should place students in realistic situations where they can see a purpose for what they’re learning. The situation doesn’t have to be real: In the State Tour task, students aren’t actually employed by a tourism agency, but they’re doing the kind of work a tourism advisor might do. This kind of authenticity helps students see the relevance of what they’re learning.

Open-Endedness

Good performance tasks allow for multiple possible responses rather than a single correct answer. In the Responsible Citizen task, students might identify very different community problems and propose very different solutions. What matters is how well they use their knowledge and skills to develop and support their proposals.

Higher-Order Thinking

Performance tasks should also require students to think beyond basic recall and comprehension. Look for verbs like apply, design, analyze, evaluate, defend, and critique.

McTighe prefers Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK) framework over Bloom’s Taxonomy for evaluating the thinking required by a task. He recommends aiming for DOK Level 3, which involves multistep thinking, application, and justification. More complex, student-directed projects may reach Level 4.

There are exceptions: For very young students or beginners learning a new language, Level 1 or 2 tasks may be more appropriate initially. As their knowledge and skills develop, teachers can gradually introduce more cognitively demanding tasks.

Designing Your Own Performance Tasks

Once you’ve identified what you want students to understand and be able to do, how do you turn those goals into a meaningful performance task?

McTighe recommends a framework called GRASPS, which he developed with Grant Wiggins. It helps teachers build a realistic context around the learning they want students to demonstrate:

Goal: What is the student trying to accomplish?
Role: What real or simulated role will the student take on?
Audience: Who is the work intended for?
Situation: What problem, challenge, or context gives the task its purpose?
Product or Performance: What will the student create or do?
Success Criteria: How will the quality of the work be evaluated?

In the State Tour example, students take on the role of tourism advisors (Role), creating an itinerary (Product) to help visitors (Audience) learn about their state (Goal). The GRASPS framework helps turn what could have been a straightforward report into a more purposeful task.

But the realistic scenario is only part of the design. The task and its assessment criteria also need to align with the intended learning goals. A rubric should focus on what students are supposed to demonstrate, not just the appearance or polish of the final product.

One practical way to check that alignment is to give a colleague your task and rubric without showing them the learning objectives. Ask them to identify what students are supposed to learn. If they can’t tell, you may need to revise the task, the rubric, or both.

Common Mistakes When Designing Performance Tasks

Even experienced teachers can run into problems when designing performance tasks. McTighe points to three common mistakes to watch out for.

1. Making the Task Too Big

Performance tasks don’t have to be elaborate, weeks-long projects. In fact, McTighe recommends starting with smaller, more manageable tasks, especially when students are new to this kind of learning. As teachers and students gain experience, they can gradually increase the complexity, duration, and level of student independence.

2. Assessing the Wrong Things

Sometimes the rubric for a performance task focuses more on the finished product than on the learning it’s supposed to demonstrate. A beautifully designed presentation, for example, doesn’t necessarily show that a student understands the content.

McTighe recommends focusing assessment criteria on the intended learning goals. For things like spelling, grammar, or presentation quality, he suggests using impact criteria: Rather than simply counting errors, consider how much those errors interfere with the effectiveness of the student’s work.

3. Prioritizing the Playbook Over the Game

McTighe compares teaching to coaching a sports team. A coach wouldn’t spend the entire season covering the playbook without giving players opportunities to practice in scrimmages and ultimately play the game. Yet teachers sometimes focus so heavily on covering standards and content that students get few opportunities to apply what they’ve learned. Rich performance tasks may even be scrapped to make room for more content coverage.

Even when a final performance task is planned, teaching individual skills isn’t enough preparation. Students also need formative assessments that function like scrimmages: smaller, similar tasks where they can practice putting their learning together and receive feedback before performing independently.

As McTighe puts it, “Our job is not to cover the playbook. The playbook is a resource. The game is what we’re preparing for.”

Rethinking Performance Assessment

Performance Tasks Are More Than Just Assessments