Alternative Assessment
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A L T E R N AT I V E A S S E S S M E N T
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ALTERNATIVE ASSESSMENT
INTRODUCTION
How the term “alternative assessment” is defined depends largely on what it is providing an alternative to. In the 1997 edition of this encyclopedia, which did not include a separate chapter on alternative assessment, McNamara observed that increasingly performance testing was viewed as a “feature of alternative assessment,” as part of “the move to base assessment not on multiple-choice format tests but on actual instances of use by learners” (p. 132). As McNamara suggested, alternative assessment is most often contrasted with traditional testing (Gipps, 1999; Huerta-Macías, 1995; Maslovaty and Kuzi, 2002; Shephard, 2000), specifically, single event, discrete-point, multiple-choice tests that result in numerical scores and the ranking of individuals. However, as Birenbaum (1996) points out, alternative assessment has become the “most generic term currently used in the assessment literature” (p. 3)—an umbrella term applied not only to performance testing, but also to other potential alternatives to traditional, discrete-point tests such as ‘authentic’ test tasks, portfolios, conferences, simulations, self- or peer-assessment, diaries, inquiry based learning projects, etc.— all of which are identified as types of alternative assessment. The term ‘alternative assessment’ is also used to refer to continuous assessment or alternative classroom assessment (Hargreaves, Earl, and Schmidt, 2002), which is used by teachers on a day-to-day basis. Such assessment is characteristically ongoing and informal, and may be accumulated as evidence of learning alongside traditional, formal assessment. As such, some argue (e.g., Bailey, 1998; Brown and Hudson, 1998) that alternatives in assessment is a more accurate description of the continuum of assessment approaches that individual teachers use—traditional tests being one of these approaches. This perspective is actively opposed by others (e.g., Lynch, 2001; Lynch and Shaw, 2005) who argue that alternative assessment represents a conception of language that is diametrically opposed to that of traditional tests; that language is “best understood as realms of social life that do not exist independently of our attempts to know them. Judgments or decisions about language ability and use cannot, therefore, be accomplished as measurement tasks: there is no ‘true score’ waiting to be
E. Shohamy and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 7: Language Testing and Assessment, 97–108. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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JANNA FOX
approximated” (Lynch, 2001, p. 362). These conflicting perspectives are further discussed in the Work in Progress section below. Yet another use of the term alternative assessment relates to accommodations or alternatives for students who have special needs (see the chapter Abedi, Utilizing Accommodations in Assessment, Volume 7). Such accommodations (including alternative testing) create conditions that will allow students with s
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