Quality Performance Assessment
If students are expected to be successful in college and career, educators and administrators must enable a diversity of learners to demonstrate what they know and can do—and measure their progress and attainment across a variety of measures, free of cultural bias and other limiting considerations.
Rethinking expectations of learners invites us to rethink once-standard assessment tools—and create new systems to help educators and learners focus on deeper mastery of content and thinking skills. Since the fall of 2008, CCE, with generous funding by the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, created Quality Performance Assessment (QPA), a new generation of processes and tools that leverage assessment as an essential tool of equitable learning and teaching. The QPA framework allows educators to create performance tasks that measure students' deeper mastery of content and the skills, in order to engage and prepare a diverse community of students for college, career, and life in the 21st century.
Addressing achievement gaps and promoting equity in education.
The QPA assessment model is culturally sensitive, allowing more than one way for students to respond to intellectual challenges, and respecting differences in backgrounds and learning styles. With no single right answer, students have greater opportunity to demonstrate their progress.
Supporting educators and promoting collaboration.
Teachers sit at the crossroads of curriculum design, instruction and assessment. The QPA process creates a collective understanding of assessment goals, of quality standards, and of desired outcomes. The process establishes a level of empowerment and trust in educators to develop assessments that are sensitive to all students’ needs.
Accurately and reliably measuring student performance.
With agreed-upon learning goals in place, teacher leaders begin to create and implement assessments that are accompanied by clear criteria, expectations and processes.
Driving quality instruction.
As they learn to interpret student work, educators become more naturally aware of opportunities to present content in formats that are engaging and relevant to students; for example, projects including research papers and oral presentations that will later be required in college and career.