Perspectives on Alternative Assessment Reform

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Perspectives on Alternative Assessment Reform Author(s): Andy Hargreaves, Lorna Earl, Michele Schmidt Source: American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 69-95 Published by: American Educational Research Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3202471 Accessed: 10/08/2010 19:08 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aera. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. American Educational Research Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Educational Research Journal. http://www.jstor.org

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Alternative Assessment vs traditional assessment.

Transcript of Perspectives on Alternative Assessment Reform

  • Perspectives on Alternative Assessment ReformAuthor(s): Andy Hargreaves, Lorna Earl, Michele SchmidtSource: American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 69-95Published by: American Educational Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3202471Accessed: 10/08/2010 19:08

    Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

    Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aera.

    Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

    JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

    American Educational Research Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to American Educational Research Journal.

    http://www.jstor.org

  • American Educational Research Journal Spring 2002, Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 69-95

    Perspectives on Alternative Assessment Reform

    Andy Hargreaves and Lora Earl Ontario Institutefor Studies in Education

    of the University of Toronto Michele Schmidt

    Texas A&M University

    This article examines classroom assessment reform from four perspectives: technological, cultural, political, andpostmodern. Each perspective highlights different issues and problems in the phenomenon of classroom assessment. The technological perspective focuses on issues of organization, structure, strategy, and skill in developing new assessment techniques. The culturalper- spective examines how alternative assessments are interpreted and integrated into the social and cultural context of schools. The politicalperspective views assessment issues as being embedded in and resultingfrom the dynamics of power and control in human interaction. Here assessment problems are caused by inappropriate use, political and bureaucratic interference, or institutional priorities and requirements. Last, the postmodern perspective is based on the view that in today's complex and uncertain world, human beings are not completely knowable and that "authentic" experiences and

    ANDY HARGREAVES is Co-director of the International Centre for Educational Change and a Professor of Theory and Policy Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6, Canada. His areas of specialization are the emotional geographies and emotional politics of teaching and leading and the relationship between teacher effectiveness and teacher development.

    LORNA EARL is Co-director of the International Centre for Educational Change and an Associate Professor of Theory and Policy Studies in Education at the Ontario Insti- tute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6, Canada. Her areas of specialization are assessment, eval- uation, and large-scale reform. In particular, she focuses on the interface between research, policy, and practice.

    MICHELE SCHMIDT is an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University, Commerce, Department of Educational Administration, Commerce, TX 75429-3011. Her current research interests include the impact of whole-school reform on teachers' learning and practice and the emotions of teachers and leaders.

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    assessments are fundamentally questionable. Using a semi-structured inter- view protocol, teachers were asked about their personal understanding of alternative forms of assessment; about how they had acquired this under- standing; how they integrated changes into theirpractices; what these prac- tices looked like; what successes and obstacles they encountered during implementation; and what support systems had been providedfor them.

    KEYWORDS: classroom assessment, multipleperspectives, middleyears teachers.

    Assessment-led reform is now one of the most widely favored strategies to Lpromote higher standards of teaching, more powerful learning, and more

    credible forms of public accountability (Murphy & Broadfoot, 1995; Gipps, 1994; Black, 1998). Although large-scale, legislated assessments receive the most attention, classroom assessments matter most of all. They drive student pedagogy and student learning (Stiggins, 1990). Many educational reforms have heralded new classroom assessment approaches that go beyond traditional paper-and-pencil techniques to include strategies such as performance- and portfolio-based assessment (Marzano, Pickering, & McTighe, 1993; Stiggins, 1997). Such alternative assessments are often intended to motivate students to take more responsibility for their own learning, to make assessment an integral part of the learning experience, and to embed it in authentic activities that rec- ognize and stimulate students' abilities to create and apply a wide range of knowledge, rather than simply engaging in acts of memorization and basic skill development (Wolf, D., Bixby, J., Glenn, J., & Gardner, H., 1991; Earl & Cousins, 1995; Stiggins, 1997). The point of alternative classroom assessments, however they are labeled, is not that they are ends in themselves but that they are designed to foster powerful, productive learning for students.

    Changes in classroom assessment represent major paradigm shifts in thinking about learning, schools, and teaching. Alternative classroom assess- ment requires that teachers use their judgments about children's knowledge, understand how to include feedback in the teaching process, decide how to meet students' varying learning needs (Tunstall & Gipps, 1995), and learn how to share decision making about learning and teaching with colleagues, parents, and students (Stiggins, 1997; Gipps, 1994). It means rethinking what assessment and teaching are for, how they can best support learning, and what kinds of curriculum goals, coverage, and standards they can help ful- fill (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998).

    The paradigm shift in classroom assessment is certainly controversial, but we believe that it is not yet controversial enough. What are the implica- tions of introducing alternative assessments? What purposes, functions, and unintended consequences might alternative assessments actually serve or produce, and how do various assessment purposes differ? How do creative classroom assessments mesh with standardized systemic ones? Do classroom assessments always operate as they should? Are they, under closer scrutiny, always really what they seem? When do they rigorously raise standards and when do they superficially simulate them? What are the serious risks of alter-

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  • Perspectives on Alternative Assessment Reform native classroom assessments, as well as the opportunities? Are classroom- based assessments always humanistic and benign in their implications for supporting student learning and development, or can they sometimes amount to sinister ways of exercising endless surveillance over the young? In our view, these are some of the deep questions that need to be asked about alternative classroom assessments, questions about their basic pur- poses, meanings, and consequences that extend far beyond technical mat- ters of implementation.

    This article is a way of arresting our own ardor for classroom assessment reform so we can step back and reflect on it critically and carefully. One way to do this is by looking at classroom assessment reform through different con- ceptual lenses or perspectives. As a far-reaching and high-stakes innovation, assessment reform is a prime candidate for House's (1981) classic and critical treatment of educational innovation. He examines educational innovation from three perspectives: technological, cultural, and political. Each perspec- tive exposes different issues and problems in the phenomenon of innovation. In this article, we apply House's three perspectives to assessment reform. Given the time that has elapsed since House's article and the ways the world has changed, we have also added a fourth perspective: a postmodern one. As we employ and apply these four perspectives, we will draw on a study that we conducted of how a group of change-oriented teachers who were committed to alternative forms of assessment (among other changes) inter- preted and implemented these assessment innovations in their own class- rooms (see Hargreaves, Earl, Moore, & Manning, 2001, for the full study). Our aim therefore is not to present exhaustive findings of the study, but to draw on the study, where relevant and where the data permit, to illustrate and exemplify in concrete terms the various perspectives on classroom assessment reform--bearing in mind that our own particular database does not permit us to illustrate all of the critical points that we make in empirical terms.

    The Study Our study focuses on 29 Grade 7 and 8 teachers in Ontario, Canada, who were identified by school system administrators as being committed to implementing changes concerning curriculum integration, broadly defined learning outcomes, and alternative forms of assessment and reporting that were embedded in a new curriculum policy. The new curriculum policy was developed in the early 1990s and consolidated in a key document (Ontario Ministry of Education and Training, 1995), one year before the election of an ultraconservative government in 1996. The wide-ranging educational reform efforts in Grades 7-9 emphasized basing the curriculum around broadly defined common learning outcomes, encouraging moves toward greater cur- riculum integration, implementing mandatory detracking (destreaming), and developing a related set of performance-based assessments. All of these mea- sures were designed to create a high-quality and inclusive educational sys- tem that would retain and engage young adolescents of all backgrounds in the educational process.

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    Specifically, the new curriculum policy comprised three closely interre- lated components:

    * Outcomes: The curriculum policy specified 10 very broad "Essen- tial Outcomes" organized into four broad program areas-"The arts," "Language," "Mathematics/Science/Technology," and "Self and Society." Within each of these areas, outcomes were specified as knowledge, skills, and values that students were expected to have developed at the end of Grades 3, 6, and 9. There were no prescrip- tive guidelines for teaching and learning or curriculum delivery. Teachers were expected to review the outcomes and plan learning activities that would enable students to achieve the outcomes.

    * Integrated Curriculum: The curriculum policy promoted integrated learning by grouping subjects into the four broad program areas and explicitly encouraging teachers to make connections across them.

    * Assessment: Teachers were expected to assess progress toward the outcomes by developing curriculum, planning rubrics, identifying indicators of reaching the outcomes, developing appropriate modi- fications for individual students, assessing both the process and the product of learning, encouraging self-assessment, and using frequent and varied assessments. In addition, teachers were responsible for communicating the assessment changes to the parents of their stu- dents. By and large, these assessment practices were encouraged through alignment with the curriculum and the support of school districts, rather than being legislatively enforced.

    Before this curriculum policy change, there had been no province-wide pro- gram of assessment beyond sample assessments designed for curriculum review. Assessment was exclusively in the purview of the classroom teacher.

    With the advent of the new Conservative government in 1996, assess- ment policy changed, particularly in terms of the development of province- wide standardized testing, including a literacy test taken by all students in Grade 9 for the first time in 2000. Beginning in 2002, high school gradua- tion will be contingent on passing the literacy test. Even in this new climate of reform, however, we are seeing that many of the other alternative assess- ment and reporting practices described in this article persist in Ontario classrooms alongside the more standardized assessments, albeit to a lesser extent.

    Our article therefore returns to a recent historical moment before stan- dards and their related assessments were narrowed, tightened, made more specific and prolific, and imposed more forcefully. We aim to recapture the principles and practices of other kinds of assessment than standardized ones. By examining this crucial moment, we hope to rekindle debates not only about what was worth fighting for in education before standardized assessment practices, but also about what continues to be worth fighting for beyond those practices. In some places, such as England and Australia, the experience of a decade of standardized assessment reform is already

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    leading to an easing of mandated curriculum and assessment expectations and to a re-embracing of more flexible, learning-based, student-centered alternatives.

    Our study used a semistructured interview protocol to ask teachers about their personal understanding of alternative forms of assessment and other ini- tiatives; about how they had acquired that understanding; how they inte- grated changes into their practices; what those practices looked like; what successes and obstacles the teachers had encountered during implementa- tion; and what supports had been provided for them. We observed for up to 10 days in each of four teachers' classrooms, and all participants were invited to attend several meetings to interact with other teachers in the project.

    The Technological Perspective

    According to House (1981), the technological perspective assumes that teaching and innovation are technologies with predictable solutions that can be transferred from one situation to another. The focus of this perspective is on the innovation itself, on its characteristics and component parts and its production and introduction as a technology. The underlying assumption in a technological perspective is that everyone shares a common interest in advancing the innovation. The only remaining issue is how best to implement it (House, 1981).

    Applied to the field of assessment reform, the technological perspective focuses on issues of organization, structure, strategy, and skill in developing new assessment techniques. From this standpoint, alternative assessment is a complex technology that requires sophisticated expertise in, for example, devis- ing valid and reliable measures for performance-based assessments in class- rooms, which will capture the complexities of student performance (Torrance, 1995). The challenge of alternative assessment, in this view, is not only to develop defensible technologies that are meaningful and fair but for teachers to develop the understandings and skills necessary to integrate assessment tech- niques, such as performance-based assessment, portfolios, self-assessment, video journals, and exhibitions, into their practice. Stiggins (1995) writes about the assessment illiteracy that pervades schools and suggests that:

    Without a crystal clear view of the meaning of academic success and without the ability to translate that vision into high quality assess- ments, we will remain unable to assist students in attaining higher levels of academic achievement effectively and to be able to integrate them into their practice. (Stiggins, 1995, p. 238)

    Classroom assessments present a morass of technological issues. Alterna- tive assessments take time (Stiggins, 1997); they bring concerns about reliabil- ity and validity (Linn, Baker, & Dunbar, 1991); they are sometimes hard to untangle from instruction (Khattri & Kane, 1995); they are often not well described (Stiggins & Bridgeford, 1985); and they frequently presume that

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    teachers already have the necessary skills to implement them (Earl & Cousins, 1995). Alternative classroom assessment is a new world for teachers, most of whom have very little (if any) assessment training, often lack fundamental measurement knowledge (Stiggins, 1991), and generally feel uncomfortable about the quality of their assessments (Stiggins, 1991; Hargreaves, Earl, Moore, & Manning, 2001). Teachers are having to become more sophisti- cated in their implementation of new assessment strategies (Cunningham, 1998). Contemporaneous with teachers' struggles to become more proficient assessors, many institutional constraints make implementing these assessments difficult. Insufficient time, resources, professional development, and consul- tancy support for teachers to become virtuoso performers with the new strate- gies are but a few of the problems (Stiggins, 1997).

    The technological challenges of alternative assessment reform are repeat- edly evident in our own data. Teachers often had great difficulty knowing how to measure outcomes. They raised questions about how indicators of the learning outcomes could be developed into reliable tools for measuring them. "The hardest part of introducing essential learning outcomes," said one teacher, "is how do you assess these outcomes?" "I think that's where I see a lot of teachers struggling." One exasperated teacher complained,

    What is an "exceeds outcome," for example, in reading in a Grade 7 class? What is it? No one has really told us. For example, if your out- come was-and these are from the list that they gave us-"reads widely and diversely," well, what does "exceeds" mean? Does that mean that they read 20 books a term, 40 books a term? No one is really clear. When you begin to look at outcomes critically, well, if you want me to evaluate the skill, what does it really mean? I don't see the Ministry giving us that! I don't see the Board [i.e., district] giv- ing us that.

    For such teachers, the complexity of the outcomes-based assessment system was formidable. One described it as follows:

    How do we measure the indicators for the outcomes? We say this is the beginning and middle for this particular outcome and you know at Grade 9, you are talking about 3, 4, 5 dimensional matrices to really be able to understand it. There are too many twists and turns. If there's too much there to start with, how do you assess the "too much"?

    The technological challenge of linking assessment and reporting prac- tices to outcomes and indicators was a difficult one. With effort and experi- mentation though, teachers began to devise ways to approach this new task.

    Not so heavy on the testing; [our guidelines stress] conferences, essays, independent studies, interviews, inventions, journals, obser- vations, peer evaluations, portfolios, presentations, projects, reports,

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  • Perspectives on Alternative Assessment Reform self evaluations, simulations, tests, videos. Testing is just a very tiny spot for me, as a teacher, in assessing their knowledge.

    They have tests for that unit in the textbook, but I also have peer evaluations; I have group evaluations, self evaluations; I have videos where we talk about, "did they follow instructions?"

    As they broadened their assessment repertoires, teachers also confronted problems in terms of their schools' ability to accommodate implementation. Time is one of the most frequently cited problems in regard to implement- ing alternative assessment (Stiggins, 1995; Cunningham, 1998). Writing anec- dotal comments, undertaking one-to-one conferencing and managing the expanding armory of assessment technology placed teachers under huge time pressures (Wilson, 1996). As one teacher put it, "I would really love to do anecdotal [reports] but I resent the amount of time that it would take me." Other teachers felt guilty about habitually being behind with their marking, or about conferencing with individual students when others in the class might not be working.

    In another study in which one of us was involved, one teacher, who had committed himself to using portfolio assessment, wrote how he quickly found himself in a "portfolio prison"-a prisoner of time.

    As the deadline for the completed portfolios approached, all of our work on the old curriculum came to a halt, and I spent most of the class time conferring with the students about their portfolios. The low point came on the day when the other teachers on my team joined most of the students on a field trip and I stayed behind at school to work with 12 students who had not completed their portfolios. Guilty! This was the beginning of my sentence in portfolio prison. In the months ahead, I felt as if I had to give up many things, including an enormous amount of time both in school and out of school, to work on the portfolio. (Adelman, Walking-Eagle, & Hargreaves, 1997, p. 19)

    An equally challenging problem for teachers was communicating the changes in assessment to parents. This was especially difficult because the report card was often inconsistent with the approaches to assessment that teachers were using.

    We had a lot of trouble this year because the marks don't mesh with the [new, outcomes-based] report card. I can certainly see if a kid is exceeding or meeting [the outcomes], but then when you have to match that with a mark, that's where we're having trouble.

    In summary, the technological perspective on alternative assessment reform draws attention to the difficulties of devising and refining valid forms of measurement; to the challenge teachers face when acquiring a wider range of assessment skills and strategies; to the need to harmonize assess- ment expectations between home and school and across school levels; and to the issue of time and resources that help or hinder the introduction of new assessment practices into the routines of the school.

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    But there is much more to alternative assessment reform than refining measurement technology, developing teachers' assessment literacy, and managing the organization's capacity to implement the change. Some of the assessment problems that manifest themselves as technological issues of implementation go beyond the assessments themselves. They are caused by inappropriate use, political and bureaucratic interference (Broadfoot, 1996), or institutional priorities and requirements that can mitigate against any sig- nificant changes in assessment (Wilson, 1996). To understand what else is at stake in alternative classroom assessment reform, we need to turn to the other three perspectives.

    The Cultural Perspective According to House (1981), the cultural perspective allows an investigation of how innovations are interpreted and integrated into the social and cultural context of schools. He suggests that the innovation process is actually an interaction of cultures. Change is conceived as blending new ideas with a cultural history. In the cultural perspective, the challenge of assessment reform is one of reculturing (Fullan, 1993; Hargreaves, 1994) or rethinking the nature and purpose of classroom assessment. The innovation of class- room assessment reform involves many new strategies. Historically, class- room assessment has been the hurdle that students needed to overcome to show they were ready for the next stage. It occurred at the end of instruc- tion, that is, the end of a class, a unit, a semester, or a school year, and was a symbol of completion and a comment on the adequacy of learning. The substance of learning was much less important than teachers' collective judg- ments about their students' learning potential, as demonstrated in routine classroom tests and exams. This approach to assessment generated the cur- rency (i.e., grades) that students (and their parents) used in the educational marketplace.

    Alternative classroom assessment, however, is seen as an integral part of, or the window into, learning (Earl & LeMahieu, 1997; Wiggins & McTighe, 1998; Broadfoot, 1996). It is concerned less with categorizing than with developing a common understanding through dialogue about when learning occurs. Such assessment must therefore be sufficiently sensitive to detect the mental representations that students hold of important ideas and the facility with which they bring understandings to bear in solving their problems (Shepard, 1991). This kind of assessment has been described as "authentic," defined by Wiggins (1989), a leader in the authentic assessment movement, as

    student work that replicates/simulates the core tasks/criteria/context done by performers in that field. Thus finding a research problem, designing the experiment, de-bugging the design, publishing the results, defending them against counter-evidence and counter- argument is "doing" science authentically (as opposed to cookbook science labs that are really just hands-on lessons). Similarly, mathe- maticians don't fill out worksheets for a living-they apply math mod-

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    elling to problems theoretical and practical, etc. Authentic should not, in my judgement, be defined as relevant or meaningful to kids, as some writers do. This is a telling mistake to me, indicating that the definer is not thinking like an assessor worrying about validity and predictability (as opposed to thinking like a teacher making real work accessible and interesting in class). (Wiggins, 1989)

    Wiggins claims that authentic assessment is multidirectional, direct, deep, and relies heavily on teachers' judgments. Students engage in "real tasks" under the watchful eye of a teacher (or teachers) who control the agenda and make positive use of the opportunities for feedback (Torrance, 1998). The assess- ment criteria are not hidden or mysterious. Teachers are encouraged to teach to the test, because the tasks for students comprise real situations that stu- dents need to master for success (Cunningham, 1998). Wiggins and McTighe (1998) argue that assessment and curriculum are two inextricably intertwined threads in learning. Moving to authentic assessment signals a shift away from curriculum coverage and associated assessments based on correct or incor- rect answers, toward "uncoverage" (i.e., making what is interesting and vital about a topic real for students by exploring). This approach involves dialogue with and among students and includes constant reassessment and ongoing self-assessment. Students are not, in these instances, passive recipients of the wisdom of teachers' judgments about their learning. They are active, engaged, and challenged contributors to their own learning.

    The report by the Ontario Ministry of Education and Training (1995) did not specifically advocate "authentic assessment" in precisely these words. However, several of its five key recommendations were consistent with authentic assessment principles, particularly the following:

    * "[A]ssessment must involve the use of a wide variety of methods so that the evaluation of students' achievement is as accurate as possible."

    * "[A]ssessment, evaluation and reporting are the responsibility of the teacher, who must consider the needs of individual students and work closely with them and their families. It is important that teach- ers involve students and parents in making decisions about student progress and programs."

    * "[A]ssessment, evaluation and reporting are continuous and essen- tial parts of curriculum and effective classroom practice."

    (Ontario Ministry of Education and Training, 1995, p. 21) A few of the teachers in our study referred to approaches that might be

    called "authentic." Some teachers involved students in the assessment exer- cise, for example. They felt that openness was very important: "[T]he kids understand whenever [I] evaluate [students] on something; they generally know how they're going to be evaluated." Another teacher was proud that "everything I do, the kids get up front. Everything I want them to learn, they get up front. How they are going to be evaluated, they get up front. There is no mystery." Sharing outcomes with students was important: "showing them first what exactly you are marking, [so] it allows them to know exactly what

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    the expectations are." For example, one teacher reported letting students see on the computer how their marks had been calculated, which "they really like to see." Specifying and sharing assessment criteria in that way was seen as increasing students' own understanding about their learning and achievement:

    For us that's really becoming important to get the kids to see it's not just a good job but why it's a good job, and to see I got this mark because I met this criterion or I didn't meet this criterion.

    Many teachers in our study wanted "evaluation [that] could be a com- fortable interplay between student and teacher." That interplay would com- prise more emphasis on student self-assessment, more joint reviews of progress between students and their teachers, more sharing of assessment targets with students, and more active partnerships between teachers, stu- dents, and their parents in discussions about progress. In the area of self- assessment, for example, teachers valued students' assessments of their own individual progress or the progress of their group. They liked portfolios because they could help students develop greater independence by encour- aging them to set up their own learning plan.

    When I do a rubric, I have teacher, peer, and self at the top, and we use the same criteria. They use it and their peers use it and we do a comparison. If you're going to demand excellence, you can set it so nobody can reach it or you can build to it. We are building to it, really thinking about what you are assessing and how you are going to do it.

    I worked the unit so that they self-evaluate and peer-evaluate and have very specific criteria to go by. And they are really very good. They are pretty accurate. I thought they would all give themselves glowing marks, but they were pretty close to my own.

    Some teachers also put great store on involving students in devising and applying the evaluation criteria themselves as an integral part of the learn- ing experience and as a responsibility that they have taken upon themselves, together with their teacher.

    We sat down and we talked about the writing outcome, how to pre- sent material in different ways to different audiences. And then we looked at different ways in which this should be evaluated, and the kids and I made up the evaluation criteria together, and then they assessed what it should be out of 5 or 6 for each particular criterion that we came up with.

    Ideally, the students generate the criteria for the evaluation, they talk about it and then we weight it. Last term, they wrote a creation myth as the major piece of writing. We talked about ... what would you see in a creation myth? Well, these are the characteristics. And, in a good piece of writing, these are the characteristics. And from that comes the evaluation. So they essentially generate the evaluation cri- teria, and that is what I use to evaluate their work.

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    Having made assessment criteria explicit, some teachers devised strate- gies for students to reflect on them and use them as a basis for their own learning. In that way, assessment and learning could begin to be integrated.

    Weekly, we have a reflection on the week's learning, and the kids need to identify what learning they have done, as well as what out- comes they have addressed. That is the time for their self-reflection in terms of "Have I made progress with this or not?"

    As we are completing work, we often stop and reflect. "All right, what outcome does this meet?" We begin to make connections.

    Teachers' assessment roles dramatically changed in authentic assessment. They became collaborators in their students' learning. There was no mystery. The quest for deep understanding was a shared one. Teachers not only inter- acted intensely with the students but also collaborated with one another to build a strong base for their strategic advice, direction, and judgments. Instead of working in isolation, they worked together to learn from what others had already done, and shared their thoughts about teaching and learning as a way of supporting their own reflection and understanding (Allen, 1998).

    In an authentic assessment system, parents are also collaborators in their children's learning. In a traditional assessment paradigm, parents are the pas- sive recipients of the coveted report card, a carefully constructed summary of their child's learning-usually as a series of numerical representations, with a small number of comments. In an authentic learning and assessment situation, the parents are partners. This is perhaps the most threatening step for teachers to take. As Allen (1998) says,

    except for the "shining examples" which tend to reflect well on stu- dent and teacher alike, samples of student work are rarely, if ever, seen by anybody besides the teacher and the student. Teachers recognise that in exposing students' work, they are exposing their own work to scrutiny (p. 9)

    In this view, parents and teachers often differed in their expectations about how student achievement should be measured. The mutual under- standing that is at the heart of the cultural perspective remained an elusive goal in many parent-teacher relationships concerned with assessment. As one teacher noted,

    The fault may be with the modifications. You still average in those "modified students," so it's not a true picture of where their child falls in the class. Even though you write on the report card "modified pro- gram," they don't see that, they see the mark. Parents would love to see how their child stacks up in class, position in the class.

    In the cultural perspective, the danger is that teachers and parents or teachers and students, will "talk past" each other, because they are using

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    different assessment criteria. For instance, teachers may be measuring children against a standard, whereas parents want them to be measured against each other (criterion- vs. norm-referenced). The solution is to build better under- standing by clarifying assessment criteria, making them transparent, and, where possible, involving students and parents in developing and discussing assessment criteria with teachers. Taking the mystery out of grading and the arbitrariness out of judgment can help build understanding with parents as well as students, as many of the teachers we studied were able to confirm. Some teachers sent outcomes and assessment criteria home with the students and included them in a newsletter so that they could be placed on the wall, on the refrigerator, or in a notebook if parents wished. One teacher explained how she carefully disaggregated students' marks so that the criteria and evi- dence through which they had been created were open, accessible, and clear.

    I have all my marks broken down so they [the students] can see exactly where they are in their marks, and I do a marks verification exercise. They like the fact that they know exactly how their mark was calculated. They might not like the mark but they perceive it as being a lot more objective so that, when the parents come in for inter- views, I have that ready for them. For the interviews, I have the whole list of their marks to date on paper for them and I put it down in front of them.

    Within the cultural perspective of authentic assessment, the task of edu- cators is not to pander to popular prejudices and assumptions about assess- ment but to deepen everyone's understanding of learning and assessment issues. This means not only explaining assessment criteria more clearly and openly but also developing them with the cooperation of others, especially students, whenever feasible. Developing this collaborative understanding with parents is as important as it is with students. Some of the teachers found that this goal could be achieved through multiple strategies:

    1. Having students fill out a sheet indicating their strengths, needs and highlights of the term to share with theirparents: I feel that when we're interviewing and the students are also letting their parents know where they are at and where they should be going, the parents feel very comfortable.

    2. Using portfolios to get students and their parents to talk together before parent interview night: I really liked the way the interviews went this time. I think it really improved communication not only between the kids and the par- ents, but between the kids, the parents and the teacher and the school. There just seemed to be a more comfortable air about the interviews. It wasn't like people were worried about coming in, and what am I going to hear about my child? They basically knew ahead of time. It just gave them time to sort through their thoughts so that they could come in and really discuss it; not just be talked at.

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  • Perspectives on Alternative Assessment Reform 3. Three-way interviews, involving parents, students, and teachers

    together: When we did reports this time, we had three staff interviews after the reports went home. Both the parents and the child came to the interview. Before the child came in, they had a chance to go over what they thought their areas of strength and weaknesses were and ways they felt that they could improve. So when they came to the interview, we had the report to go from, we had what the child felt were his/her areas of strength and weakness and the teacher's if they differed from the child's. The parents also had time ahead of time to write things, so that when we came in everybody was orga- nized for the interview and knew the types of things that were going to be discussed. I think it really improved the communication not only between the kids and the parents but between the kids, the parents and the teacher and the school. Not one parent came to (the principal) with concerns about the interview.

    4. Using a daily agenda to maintain continuous contact with parents: The kids keep track in their agenda of the work that they have, and every night they need to get it signed by the parents. Parents or stu- dents can write me a note in their agenda if the student has had trouble with something, and I write back. I could be writing to the student, I could be writing to the parent. This is an area for contin- ual contact with the parents daily.

    5. Informal contacts with parents beyond written reports and agendas orformal meetings: Last year I had time and actually called parents up from time to time when a kid had written a particularly good lab report and say I just wanted to let you know that so and so hadn't been doing so well, and all of a sudden they hand in this wonderful lab report and I'm impressed with it. That earns me brownie points; the payoff is phe- nomenal. The parents are so happy.

    In summary, a cultural perspective of classroom assessment emphasizes the interplay among points of view, values, and beliefs. Viewed this way, the task of developing alternative assessment moves far beyond technological matters of measurement, skill, coordination, and existing relationships into the area of establishing communication and building understanding among all those involved in the assessment exercise.

    The Political Perspective The political perspective on educational innovation, in House's (1981) view, involves the exercise and negotiation of power, authority, and competing interests among groups. A political perspective on alternative assessment rec- ognizes that all assessments involve acts of power, and it identifies the prob- lems of implementing alternative classroom assessment as moving beyond issues of technical coordination and human communication to encompass the power struggles among ideologies and interest groups in schools and

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    societies. A political perspective also treats alternative classroom assessment as itself being problematic-as a strategy that might not empower people but could become a sophisticated new form of selection and surveillance.

    Torrance and Pryor (1995) identify two conceptually distinct approaches to classroom assessment. In convergent assessment, the important thing is to know if the child knows, understands, or can do a predetermined thing. The power of decision making resides clearly with the teacher. Divergent assess- ment, on the other hand, emphasizes the learner's understanding rather than the agenda of the assessor. Here, the focus is discovering what the child knows, understands, or can do. Students have to accept some responsibility for learning, and teachers are charged with creating the conditions for this to occur. Assessment is part of the process. The underlying philosophy of many of the alternative approaches to classroom assessment is that assess- ment is an essential part of learning. It is the feedback loop that allows teach- ers, students, and parents to identify the extent to which learning has occurred and to shape their actions for the next stage of learning (Earl & LeMahieu, 1997; Gipps, 1994; Stiggins, 1995). Divergent classroom assess- ment reforms make it important that assessment criteria be transparent, equally available to all, and publicly contestable in their application; that assessment criteria are known to students and often developed collabora- tively with them so that better understanding can be developed and class- room power can be redistributed; that assessment judgments are acts of explicit negotiation among all those involved; and that assessment processes move in many directions from student to student, from student to teacher, and between parents and teachers, for example, as well as from teacher to student. Teachers in our study who engaged students and their parents in assessment were explicitly aware of these issues.

    I like the idea of talking to the students and the parents both at the same time. The power of the portfolio conference is that [students have] an opportunity to talk about what they have done, where they are going, and what their goals are. [They have] tremendous power, and you can see it in the parents' faces that they [have] really listened to what their son and daughter had been doing. They [have] really understood it, and it related to the report card.

    The political potential of alternative assessment strategies was most apparent when teachers invited evaluation of themselves, that is, when assessment moved in more than one direction. Some teachers appreciated that their own practice could be opened to scrutiny, and they used assess- ment to help them reflect on and change the way they taught.

    I ask the kids at the end, "Where could I have changed things? What was the most difficult thing in this unit? If you were the teacher, how would you change it?" to help me out so that next year when I teach it I look back and see where I can make those changes, to help them out. I'm getting feedback, and I'm trying to learn from their feedback where I can improve the course.

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  • Perspectives on Alternative Assessment Reform If alternative assessment promises to establish more positive micropolit-

    ical relationships among teachers, students, and parents, it is politics too, at the micro and macro levels, that can undermine the successful implementa- tion of these new strategies. For example, high schools pressure their ele- mentary colleagues to use more conventional forms of measurement and reporting. So do parents. Coordinating expectations across communities and systems is a considerable political challenge for assessment reformers as well as a technical challenge. Teachers in one school district, for example, had to deal with a complex and demanding new literacy profile that had to be administered to all their students.

    There is now this literacy report that [all students] must have follow- ing them from kindergarten to grade 12. It is an amazing amount of work to be done by the teacher on each student. [Teachers] have to have three samples of writing, which has to have five pages of cor- relating checkmarks to go through, throughout each year, on each student they teach. And it involves assessment on an individual basis, and I don't know how they are going to do this.

    [The] literacy assessment profile [is] a lot of work and a lot of test- ing. There's just so much going on that all you're doing is testing. All you're doing is assessment. There's very little so-called teaching/ learning going on because we're spending so much time testing.

    Many of these contradictions are embedded in assessment policy itself. They represent different points of view about assessment held by teachers, on the one hand, and by educational policymakers and the real and imag- ined public to whom they cater, on the other. These contradictory forces have made assessment reform a schizophrenic activity (Earl & LeMaheiu, 1997; Firestone, Mayrowetz, & Fairman, 1998). It is hard to expect teachers to har- monize their assessment practices when policymakers and the wider public cannot.

    These inconsistencies are deeply embedded in policy (Nuttall, 1994; Darling-Hammond, 1992). One group of reformers holds that educational change and improved student learning are the responsibility of some exter- nal individual or group in authority with the power to judge quality, exer- cise control, and order compliance. Assessment is used as the mechanism to provide evidence for these decisions. Hard, numerical, standardized, and comparable assessment data culled from examinations or objective tests, applied consistently to large populations, are what these groups of reform- ers desire. This view is often based on the assumption that teachers have both the capacity and the ability to act in different, more productive ways but are unfocused, recalcitrant, lazy, or unmotivated. The obvious remedy for increasing student learning is to apply pressure and issue educational reform directives.

    Other reformers believe that educational change and improved student learning are largely internal processes that the people who live and work in classrooms must undertake. The major purpose of assessment in this case is

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    to help teachers and students improve classroom learning. Assessment is an opportunity for them to reflect, question, plan, teach, study, and learn. Assess- ment reform is not connected to compliance with mandates but is rooted in the constructivist view that learning depends on self-monitoring and reflec- tion. Reformers committed to this stance assume that many teachers do not have current knowledge or skills about changing theories of learning or assessment (the technological perspective) and require support to acquire knowledge and training before they can change their practices. Assessment reform, then, provides an opportunity for teachers to share ideas and discuss their standards together, achieve agreement about consistent and equitable expectations for quality, and create feedback loops directed toward chang- ing the way they teach (the cultural perspective).

    The political and practical conundrum for teachers is that policymakers often avoid choosing between these different value positions about educational change and the reform groups that support them. To maintain support and avoid criticism, policymakers often blur the issues and try to appeal to both camps (Hargreaves, Earl, & Ryan, 1996; Firestone, Mayrowetz, & Fairman, 1998), embracing common standards and individual variation, numerical com- parability and descriptive sensitivity, to both improve individual student learn- ing and placate demands for system-wide accountability. Teachers are left to cope with the consequences-consequences that even the most change- oriented teachers find exasperating. Resolving these contradictions should therefore be a political problem for policymakers and not merely a practical problem for teachers.

    In the United States and elsewhere, one disturbing trend is that more standardized assessments and the demands that they place on teachers and students have become by far the more dominant of the two reform patterns. In the United States, for example, states such as Massachusetts have instan- taneously eclipsed alternative assessments focused on classroom learning with content-loaded curriculum reforms and their associated assessments (Oakes, Quartz, Ryan, & Lipton, 2000). In states such as Virginia, broad- based reforms oriented toward outcomes, and the flexible assessments that accompanied them and that enabled teachers to address the individual needs of their diverse students, have been attacked, then reversed in favor of more conventional, standardized forms, as a result of pressure from elite parents' groups (Nespor, forthcoming). Meanwhile, research that my colleagues and I are undertaking for the Spencer Foundation, entitled Change Over Time (on 30 years of secondary education in Canada and New York State) reveals a more gradual encroachment of standardized assessments in New York State over a 7-year period, culminating in high-stakes, content-based assess- ments in five subjects. Moreover, graduation depends on demonstrating min- imum competency in all these subjects and their assessments. Our evidence is that this is leading teachers either to abandon teaching practices that inclu- sively address the varying needs of all their students in favor of rote test preparation, or to exhaust themselves preparing students for the tests at the same time as assisting students with assessments that enable them to demon-

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  • Perspectives on Alternative Assessment Reform strate more sophisticated learning through performances and exhibitions (Hargreaves, in press, chapter 3).

    The political perspective does not simply illuminate the differences between traditional and alternative assessment practices and pit them and their advocates against each other, as if this were some kind of war between good and evil. It also highlights the political risks and excesses of alternative assessment practices themselves. Nowhere is this more true than in the assessment of affect. In entering the affective domain of student assessment, beyond the customary preoccupation with effort, teachers in our study con- fronted serious and significant obstacles. In general, most of them tried to evaluate more than students' intellect. The way many teachers described how they actually assessed affect, however, seemed tantamount to exercis- ing behavioral surveillance over everything that their students did in an unending set of judgments from which there seemed little escape (Foucault, 1977; Hargreaves, 1989).

    Assessing the affective domain for many teachers entailed using check- lists to assess things like body language, the amount of work produced, mak- ing positive comments to one's group partners, paying attention in class, displaying positive attitudes toward the subject, completing homework, and showing willingness to seek extra help from the teacher. If one student made a "snarky" comment about another, the latter, though an exceptional student, might be reclassified as one "who really understands the concepts well [but] may have terrible cooperative team skills which would detract from his 'A' grade." Some teachers kept things of this sort in mind to use when they made more formal evaluations, or they put checkmarks in their markbooks to record them. In one instance, it seemed that peer evaluation (which can be extremely useful as an honest and valued form of feedback among students) had degenerated into snitching and spying. One teacher reported what peer evaluation in his case might involve:

    Having somebody else look at the number and say, "Why are you putting down 8 out of 10? I remember the times when you told so- and-so to F- off." "You know, Mr. X, you didn't hear that, so maybe you should think about lowering that a bit."

    Many of the affective attributes that teachers assessed seemed to be syn- onyms for student compliance with the behavioral norms of schooling, not behavior such as questioning, risk taking, assertiveness, initiative, or cre- ativity that might serve students better in the world beyond school (despite raising management problems for the teachers who taught them).

    Few scholars have anticipated these political problems of contemporary assessment better than the French social theorist Michel Foucault. According to Foucault (1977), attitudes toward discipline and punishment today have moved beyond vengeance and torture, or correction and incarceration, toward successive or complementary forms of discipline. Discipline, Fou- cault argues, is now a finely graded, carefully regulated process of adminis-

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    trative control over body and mind where surveillance is perpetual and per- vasive, intense and intrusive, continuous and remorseless in its application and effects. Few processes, Foucault suggests, represent these principles more clearly than the examination.

    The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy with those of a normalizing judgment. It is a normalizing gaze, a sur- veillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish. (p. 184)

    With the advent of disciplinary methods, written description became "a means of control and a method of domination, no longer a measurement for future memory, but a document for possible use" (p. 191). In this particular kind of case-record-based examination, each individual is made into a doc- umented case, judged and compared as someone who may now, or at some future unknown point, need to be trained or corrected, classified, normal- ized, excluded, and so forth. This building of a dossier-of an extended case record, to be retrieved and referred to at any future point-comes uncom- fortably close to certain aspects of alternative assessment practice such as continuous student assessment, self assessment, peer assessment, and port- folio assessment. These processes permit educational selection to be self- guided and failure to be disclosed gradually, in stages, as in the therapeutic, rather than sudden and shocking, disclosures about terminal illness that med- ical staff make to hospital patients (Hopfl & Linstead, 1993). Alternative assessments can stage the gradual disclosure of failure as modern medicine stages the disclosure of death.

    Moreover, wide-ranging and unending alternative assessments can embody panoptic principles of observation and monitoring. Panopticism is a principle of discipline in which power is exercised through an all-seeing, invisible observer. As a result, "the constant pressure acts even before the offences, mistakes or crimes have been committed. Its strength is that it never intervenes, it is exercised spontaneously and without noise" (p. 206). The bleakest possible political scenario for systems of alternative assessment is one approximating the "ideal" system of modern penal treatment described by Foucault. Such a system, he argued,

    would be an indefinite discipline; an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a particular and ever more analytical observation, a judgment that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed. (p. 227)

    Affect needs to be assessed thoughtfully and reflectively in schools if it is to contribute to children's learning in a significant way and not merely make the children easier to control. Teachers in our study occasionally pointed out the importance of not assessing everything, or of not evaluat- ing all of a child's portfolio. One teacher's story illustrated the limits she

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  • Perspectives on Alternative Assessment Reform felt it was important to establish to guard against the political risks of alter- native assessment:

    I have one little girl in my room [with a pronounced disability]. She has had to deal with an awful lot in her life. But if you question her in the class in front of the other kids-Oh, how can I mark a kid like that in communication? I refuse to do that. Whereas I have other kids, it is a personality thing. I'm not here to change a kid's per- sonality. I will coax it along or I will try to develop it in certain ways, but that is all!

    Postmodem Perspectives House's (1981) perspectives provide a set of classic lenses for understand- ing classroom assessment as it has been and is evolving. Since House set out his three perspectives on educational innovation, our social and educational worlds have changed dramatically. Many people in industrialized nations now view themselves as living in a distinct, new social era. This era has been variously labeled modernity (Giddens, 1990), postmodernity (Harvey, 1989; Baumann, 1992), postindustrialism (Bell, 1976), postcapitalism (Drucker, 1992), or the informational society (Castells, 1996).

    The postmodern condition has begun to reshape public education and the agenda for educational change. Three issues are particularly relevant to the discussion of assessment reform. The first concerns the impact of com- plexity, diversity, and uncertainty. The electronically generated profusion and confusion of knowledge and information is challenging assumptions about what is most essential to teach. At the same time, the growing cultural diversity of many student populations is challenging the established canons of Western knowledge and belief that have underpinned the curriculum. As a result, schooling has been assailed by disputes and uncertainties between multiculturalists and creationists, colonialists and post-colonialists, promot- ers of multiple intelligences and defenders of traditional standards of con- tent. Sometimes, and in some places, governments have rolled with and even embraced these uncertainties and complexities, valuing multiple intelli- gences, diverse learning (and teaching) styles, and a process-based and inte- grated rather than content-based and specialized curriculum. At other times, governments have countered the spread of uncertainties with an emphatic assertion and imposition of false certainties of their own, pandering to parents' nostalgia for the kinds of schooling they think they remember (Hargreaves, in press) and taking refuge in "procedural illusions of effectiveness" (Bishop & Mulford, 1996) that standardized tests and other technical certainties reassur- ingly provide. Contradictory assessment imperatives are, in this respect, at least partly a postmodern phenomenon.

    The second issue concerns the impact of electronically stimulated and simulated images and appearances on the core work of education and edu- cational change. The existence and expansion of new technologies drive peo-

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    pie's ideas of what skills children should learn (e.g., computer literacy); how teaching and learning should be reorganized (computers integrated into class- rooms, schools without walls); how learning can best be represented (multi- ple formats, different fonts, slick designs); and how systems of assessment, accountability, and administration can be integrated and accessed techno- logically within common or interconnected systems of information. At the same time, the intrusion of market-choice principles into public education has led parents to act increasingly like fragmented individual consumers. In a world of great uncertainty, with reduced attention to contributing to the pub- lic good of all society's children, they feel they can at least provide the best for their own children. In this supermarket of schooling, how the products and processes of education are designed and packaged is crucial. How learn- ing, schools, results, and report cards look matters for the credibility and very survival of many schools, as parents are able and often incited to choose between them. Image appears to be everything.

    The third issue is the impact of postmodern influences on children, turn- ing them into strangers in many of their teachers' classrooms. Schools cater to children living postmodern lives. Family structures are more complicated (Elkind, 1997). Who the "real" family or parents of children are is often not the least bit clear. What a family truly is any more is no longer a singular or self-evident matter. Intelligence is no longer seen as singular, fixed, or pre- dictable. In culturally diverse classrooms, how children learn, think, feel, and believe is acknowledged as being complex and cannot be taken for granted. What is important or real to children today, in their world of CDs, MTV, walk- men and discmen, computers and videogames and multichannel TV, is also complex and constantly changing. Children may interact multiculturally in their classrooms but associate with their own ethnocultural group in the school cafeteria, shifting their allegiances and identities from one situation to the next (Ryan, 1995). "Students," teachers say, "have changed." They no longer seem knowable or predictable. Many teachers today feel that they have aliens in their classrooms (Bigum, Fitzclarence, Green, & Kenway, 1994). What does all this mean for assessment reform in the postmodern age? What issues can a postmodern perspective on alternative assessment high- light that older perspectives do not?

    A postmodern perspective on alternative assessment is based on the view that in today's complex and uncertain world, human beings are not completely knowable. No assessment process or system can therefore be fully comprehensive. "Authenticity" has been paraded as a solution to the problems of assessment, but the meanings and the existential experiences we describe as authentic are fundamentally questionable. This section chal- lenges and critiques the previous three, widely held perspectives on alter- native classroom assessment. It does so largely not by describing new data from our study (although we do some of this), but by reflecting critically on the interpretations that we have presented so far, to deepen the critical analy- sis of alternative classroom assessment more generally.

    The postmodern perspective challenges the very concept of authentic assessment. Webster's dictionary defines authenticity as "the quality of being

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    authoritative, valid, true, real or genuine and "bona fide." Several definitions of "authentic" are offered-all of them problematic when applied to educa- tion and assessment in a postmoder paradigm.

    One meaning of "authentic" is that it "stresses fidelity to actuality and fact" and "is not contradicted by evidence," yet in the postmodern age, sin- gular and unquestioned views of reality and fact are being deposed by multiple perspectives grounded in culturally diverse viewpoints. Alternative assessment may be diverse, wide-ranging, negotiated, inclusive, and multi- faceted, but this is precisely why it cannot be "authentic" in this first sense of the term.

    A second meaning of "authentic," according to Webster's dictionary, is applicable where an authentic phenomenon proceeds "indisputably ... from a given source that is avowed or implied." Yet in a postmodern world of uncer- tain and contested knowledge, the very idea of indisputability of source or origin is untenable. Music, literature, and fashion freely recycle, blend, and syn- thesize styles, genres, and motifs from different cultures, formats, and periods as in Cuban jazz, Afro-Celt, or techno-pop. In education, computer technol- ogy, e-mail, and the Internet make it possible for students to engage in cyber- cheating from students in other schools or from commercial sites such as "The Evil House of Cheat" (Hargreaves, in press). This gives students the power to cull instant information from multiple sources at the click of a mouse or to download pictures and pie charts rather than develop the skills of compiling data and representing them through their own creative ingenuity. In the age of electronic education it is more difficult to discern if students' work is their own, to determine whether the sources from which their work draws are reputable, and to decide if these things matter. In the postmodern paradigm, assessments clearly cannot be authentic in the sense of having indisputable origins.

    In a third definition, Webster's describes authenticity as "close conformity to an original: accurately and satisfyingly reproducing essential features," as in a portrait. This is close to Wiggins's (1989) definition of authentic assessment as repeating and simulating the core tasks and criteria for performers in a given field. Yet alternative assessments are less similar to "realistic" photographs or "faithful" portraits than are cubist paintings-representing and interpreting rather than reproducing reality from multiple angles and perspectives.

    Last, "authentic" can, in Webster's terms, mean possessing "complete sincerity without feigning or hypocrisy." Yet the postmodern world of sim- ulation is one where illusion is widespread and acceptable, where new jeans are faded to look old, modern buildings are given traditional facades, and fake rocks adorn the spectacular atriums of Las Vegas hotels because they look more real than real ones (Ritzer, 1998). In the postmodern world, image often supersedes reality and becomes increasingly indistinguishable from it (Baudrillard, 1990). "Authentic" assessments simulate reality as much as they create it, producing beautiful "fakes" of grown-up book publications, the- atrical performances, or artistic portfolios, for example.

    Perhaps few things are more contrived and less authentic than authentic assessment, where there is a constant sorting, sifting, and reflecting on one's

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    achievements in a portfolio, assessing one's peers using complex grids of cri- teria, or engaging in stage-managed three-way interviews with parents and stu- dents. Little could be more artificial or manufactured than this. In the face of complex postmoder assessment technology, an old-fashioned gut response of "B+, could do better" starts to seem much more authentic and sincere.

    In her dissection of authenticity and educational change, urban school principal Debbie Meier (1998) cuts to the chase when she says,

    Artificiality doesn't have to be a bad word, and authenticity isn't a guarantee of good education. Playing scales on the piano over and over is surely "artificial" but so is the piano and what we do on it. Whether it's justified depends both on how much we value its end purpose and whether we conclude it's a good route toward reaching such an end. (p. 596)

    The truth is that schools, with their corridors, blackboards, desks, and lockers, are highly artificial places. As an organization, what really should matter is that learning and its assessment are purposeful and engaging for students. "Much of what passes for authentic curriculum and authentic assessment in the jargon of contemporary pedagogy," says Meier, "seems to miss this point by giving in to the search for entertainment and avoidance of boredom rather than in pursuit of clear purposes and powerful learning" (p. 598).

    The most formidable critique of the idea of authenticity in the post- modern perspective, however, is not just that it is difficult to achieve in post- modern times. Rather, the celebration of "authenticity" is itself a postmodern phenomenon. In his analysis of post-emotional society, Skjepan Mestrovic (1997) argues that postmodern society is characterized by a manufacturing, even a McDonaldization of people's emotions, where we are taught how and what to feel in a Disneyesque culture of "niceness." Post-emotional society is, in this sense, one of "artificially contrived authenticity" (p. 80). In a world where designer fashions are labeled "authentic" and Coca Cola is "the real thing," achieving authenticity becomes an emotional symbol, suggesting that in the face of increasing inequalities, mounting violence, and rampant indi- vidualism, at least our consumer purchases and lifestyle choices can make us feel more authentic, less fake, and more real. The danger of making "authentic assessment" into a "holy grail" of educational change is that it might well contribute to and become part of this wider discursive, rhetorical distortion, promising "feel good" improvement and empowerment in a world where poverty and inequity continue to rise.

    What are some of the dangers to be vigilant about here? Sophisticated forms of representing learning for some educators can amount to little more than slick images and superficial appearances to others. Alternative assess- ments, especially portfolio assessments, can simulate rather than stimulate achievement. Students and teachers can be seduced into valuing form over substance, image over reality, with glossy covers, elegant fonts, and a sprin-

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    kling of multicolored graphs and flow-charts masking mediocre content and analysis. Portfolios may become devices to drive and define students' achievement, so that students perform community service or extracurricular activities not because of their moral value but because they want to have the right kind of curriculum vitae or portfolio. In these ways, portfolio and per- formance assessments can easily trivialize and diminish the substance of learning, reducing it to surface appearances.

    Various kinds of self-assessment can draw students into processes of inner exploration that amount to psycho-communicative excess (Denzin, 1984). In the name of self-reflexiveness, which Giddens (1995) describes as characterizing the postmoder age, self-assessment might actually cultivate an inwardly narcissistic, self-indulgent, and self-centered personality by mak- ing it into an endless, obsessive object of reflection and re-presentation (Lasch, 1990). As with the classic narcissistic personality, individuals who are engaged in continuous self-reflection can become "boundless selves" (Hargreaves, 1994) who learn no limits to their own egos and desires and overestimate their ability to transform the world. Thus, in the absence of honest criticism, young people may be induced to parade their psyches in public, irrespective of the quality or worth of their achievements.

    In his study of the implementation of portfolio assessment in an ele- mentary school and its district, Nespor (1997) shows how teachers used the complex signs and representations of portfolio assessment to avoid or obscure grading hierarchies. Teachers, in other words, used the discourse of portfolios to connect themselves to other members of their profession rather than to communicate clearly with the parents of the students they were sup- posed to serve. The parents (especially the working-class parents) were all too aware that the later stages of schooling and adult life beyond were dif- ferentiated and unequal, and this made them rightly anxious for "objective" scores and grades that showed where their children stood (so that they could take corrective action, if necessary).

    Alternatively, in positive terms, a postmodern assessment practice can offer multiple representations of students' learning in ways that give max- imum voice and visibility to their diverse activities and accomplishments. In this sense, a postmodern system of alternative assessment comprises multiple forms of representation of students' achievement through written, numerical, oral, visual, technological, or dramatic media that are collected in a diverse portfolio of activity and achievement. Hierarchical distinctions of worth between these different forms of representation are diminished or eliminated, so that the achievements of students from visually oriented cul- tures, for example, are not systematically devalued in comparison with the achievements of students whose forte is more in the areas of writing or arithmetic. This allows students' work to be seen through multiple per- spectives and allows the complexity of their abilities and identities to be acknowledged more readily. The empowering nature of this process is revealed in the following quotes:

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  • Hargreaves, Earl, and Schmidt I said to them a little different something today.... "Instead of refil- ing your portfolio, I want you to keep it. I want you to look through it. I want you to make a statement in front of the whole class about how you feel about it at this stage in the game and the reason for your feeling, if you can say that." And they all go, "Oh please Miss, don't make us say that." Anyway they did it. One kid said to me in front of the class, "You know Mrs. Woods, my whole life I thought I know I'm not very smart; I'm not very academic and therefore I thought I wasn't very good at very many things." But then he looks in the port- folio and even though he's still not very academic, there's so many things that he is good at.

    The kids have a cross-curricular, extra-curricular portfolio that is ... equal between academic skills, personal management skills, and teamwork skills. Once a week the kids administer their portfo- lios. They put in a piece or they write about an event or an activity. They have to reflect on the skills.

    Such a postmoder system of alternative assessment involves the students' voices in the process of assessment (as we outlined earlier) and in determin- ing how the products of assessment might be compiled and used. Such stu- dent involvement is not just an act of empowerment but is also a way for teachers to acknowledge that they cannot fully know their students and may not even begin to know them without having access to the self-understanding of students themselves. As postmodern conditions have destabilized people's beliefs in the capacity of experts to judge others with any certainty, other peo- ple's ideas about their own experience, their own health, or their own learn- ing have begun to be treated more seriously. The struggle for knowledge about students in postmodern times is no longer something that should depend on the technical judgment or holistic insight of the teacher or of gov- ernments. Instead, communities of people should dialogue with students in ongoing conversations about students' learning and achievement in relation to a range of contents and with different purposes. Such conversations concen- trate on multiple readings of students' work that might be represented by business people judging science fairs; or by parents, teachers, and students engaging in three-way interviews about student portfolios together on parents' night; or by employers, media representatives, and community members dis- cussing and developing their own accountability indicators (instead of simply applying other people's) (Earl & LeMahieu, 1997).

    Conclusion

    Each of these perspectives on alternative assessment reform points to opportunities to make assessment, learning, and teaching more technolog- ically sophisticated, more critical and empowering, more collaborative and reflective, than they have ever been. Each also highlights the risks that alter- native classroom assessment might extend into apparently endless surveil- lance, degenerate into narcissistic self-indulgence, or crowd out deeper learning and classroom caring. Choosing the positive over the negative sce-

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    narios should not be left to hope or fate. Rather, by drawing thoughtfully and critically from all four perspectives, we should and can exercise greater vig- ilance in pursuit of educational values that will move alternative assessment reform in educationally rigorous, equitable, and sustainable directions.

    Note We have chosen "postmoderity" as the best descriptor because, in our view, the

    widespread impact of computerization and information technologies on all areas of cul- ture and society marks a decisive break from any preceding period in history for eco- nomic, political, and social life and, indeed, for everyday experience. Because many elements of industrialism have been retained and because in some countries, computeri- zation has been used to revolutionize industrial production rather than develop services and other kinds of activity outside the industrial sphere, postindustrialism is not an appro- priate term (Castells, 1996). Postcapitalism is an equally unsatisfactory descriptor, since former communist countries are also captured and transformed by the new economic and informational developments.

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    Manuscript received March 30, 2001 Accepted September 7, 2001

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    Article Contentsp.[69]p.70p.71p.72p.73p.74p.75p.76p.77p.78p.79p.80p.81p.82p.83p.84p.85p.86p.87p.88p.89p.90p.91p.92p.93p.94p.95

    Issue Table of ContentsAmerican Educational Research Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 1-233Front Matter [pp.1-97]Social and Institutional AnalysisOn the Power of Separate Spaces: Teachers and Students Writing (Righting) Selves and Future [pp.7-36]Choosing Tracks: "Freedom of Choice" in Detracking Schools [pp.37-67]Perspectives on Alternative Assessment Reform [pp.69-95]

    Teaching, Learning, and Human DevelopmentEditorial Statement [pp.99-100]Relationships between Class Size and Teaching: A Multimethod Analysis of English Infant Schools [pp.101-132]Early Child Care and Children's Development Prior to School Entry: Results from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care [pp.133-164]Tracing Teachers' Use of Technology in a Laptop Computer School: The Interplay of Teacher Beliefs, Social Dynamics, and Institutional Culture [pp.165-205]Class Composition and Student Achievement in Elementary Schools [pp.207-233]

    Erratum: Beating the Odds: Teaching Middle and High School Students to Read and Write WellBack Matter