Putting the Focus on Student Engagement: The Benefits of Performance-Based Assessment

For more than two decades, the New York Performance Standards Consortium, a coalition of 38 public high schools, has steered clear of high-stakes testing, which superficially assess student learning. Instead, the consortium's approach relies on performance-based assessments--essays, research papers, science experiments, and high-level mathematical problems--to engage students and measure their knowledge and skills in a deep and meaningful way over time. In this article, the authors present how this form of assessment is working and benefiting the students.