Going Beyond Tests: Alternative Methods for Assessing Student Learning

Tests and quizzes have their place. Sometimes a short quiz is exactly what a teacher needs. If the goal is to find out whether students remember vocabulary, can solve a particular type of problem, or understand the main ideas from yesterday’s lesson, there is nothing inherently wrong with asking them some questions and checking the answers.

The trouble begins when a test becomes our answer to every assessment question.

Students may be able to recognize the correct answer without being able to explain why it is correct. They may know facts but struggle to apply them. They may produce an impressive project without understanding some of the ideas behind it. A student who contributes constantly during a group activity may understand the material well—or may simply be good at talking.

Different assessments reveal different things.

That is the real value of alternative assessment. The point isn’t to get rid of tests. It is to collect better evidence of the particular learning we are trying to see.

What Is Alternative Assessment?

The term alternative assessment is often used for ways of assessing students other than traditional selected-response tests. Depending on the classroom and the learning goal, that might include:

• written explanations
• demonstrations
• projects
• portfolios
• presentations
• observations
• discussions
• experiments
• performance tasks
• student conferences
• self-assessment
• peer feedback
• exit tickets
• problem-solving tasks
• real-world applications

That is a pretty broad collection, and that is important.

There isn’t one “alternative assessment method” that replaces traditional testing. A portfolio and an exit ticket are both alternatives to a conventional test, but they answer very different questions.

A portfolio may show growth over several months. An exit ticket may tell you that half the class misunderstood something you taught 20 minutes ago.

The useful question is not, “Should I use a test or an alternative assessment?”

It is:

What do I need students to demonstrate, and what kind of evidence would actually show me that?

Start With What You Want to Know

Assessment works better when the task matches the learning goal. If students were expected to analyze, design, explain, perform, investigate, or apply something, an assessment that measures only recall may miss much of the intended learning. Alignment among objectives, instruction, and assessment is a basic principle of assessment design.

Before choosing an assessment, ask what you are really trying to find out.

If students need to remember information, a quiz might work perfectly well.

If they need to explain a concept, have them explain it in writing, orally, with a diagram, or by working through an example.

If they need to solve a problem, give them a problem that requires the skill.

If they need to perform a procedure, watching them perform it may tell you more than asking them to answer questions about the procedure.

If they need to evaluate evidence, give them evidence and ask them to make and defend a judgment.

If they need to apply learning in a new situation, give them a situation that is different enough that simply copying a familiar procedure will not work.

This sounds obvious when written out. In a busy classroom, however, it is easy to fall into the habit of assessing what is easiest to grade instead of what we actually intended students to learn.

Formative Assessment: Find Out While There Is Still Time to Respond

Formative assessment is often described as assessment that takes place during learning, but timing is only part of the idea.

What makes assessment formative is that the evidence is used to improve ongoing teaching or learning. Carnegie Mellon University’s Eberly Center describes its purpose as gathering feedback that teachers and students can use to guide improvements while learning is still taking place.

Suppose students complete an exit ticket at the end of math class.

If the papers are collected, given points, and never looked at until much later, the activity did not accomplish much formatively.

If the teacher notices that 11 students made essentially the same error and begins the next lesson by addressing that misconception, the assessment affected instruction.

That is the part that matters.

Useful formative assessments can be surprisingly small:

• Ask students to solve one problem on a mini-whiteboard and hold it up.
• Ask everyone to write the main idea of a passage in one sentence.
• Give a three-question quiz before moving to the next concept.
• Ask students to explain why an answer is correct rather than merely provide the answer.
• Have students identify which part of a process still confuses them.
• Use an exit ticket to decide whether tomorrow should begin with review, reteaching, or something new.

A teacher does not need to grade everything that produces useful assessment information. Sometimes all you need is enough evidence to answer, “Can we move on?”

Using Classroom Discussion as Assessment

Discussion can provide excellent information about student thinking because you can hear students explain, justify, question, connect, and sometimes revise their ideas.

But simply having a discussion does not guarantee that you know what the class understands.

One familiar problem is that the same handful of students answer most of the questions. It is possible to have a lively discussion involving six students while 20 other students remain mysteries.

If discussion is being used partly as assessment, widen the evidence.

You might have students think or write before anyone answers. Students can discuss an idea with a partner before responses are shared with the class. Everyone might choose an answer before volunteers explain their reasoning. You can also ask follow-up questions that uncover thinking rather than stopping as soon as someone produces the correct answer.

“How did you decide that?”

“What evidence supports your answer?”

“Would that always work?”

“Who solved it another way?”

Those questions reveal much more than “Who knows the answer?”

Authentic and Performance Assessments

Authentic assessment generally asks students to use knowledge or skills in a meaningful task rather than simply recognize or recall information.

That can include:

• conducting an experiment
• writing for a particular audience
• designing a solution to a problem
• giving a presentation
• analyzing a case or scenario
• creating a model
• performing a skill
• interpreting real data
• constructing and defending an argument
• applying mathematics to a practical situation

These assessments can be especially useful when the learning goal itself involves application.

If students are learning to conduct an investigation, for example, there is a limit to what a multiple-choice test can reveal. Eventually, you probably need to see them plan, perform, interpret, or explain some part of an investigation.

But authentic assessment is not automatically better because it looks more interesting.

A complicated project can actually make assessment harder if too many unrelated skills become tangled together.

Imagine students are asked to demonstrate their understanding of the water cycle by creating elaborate three-dimensional models. One student’s project is beautiful. Another student’s looks like it survived a minor natural disaster.

Which student understands the water cycle better?

You cannot answer that from appearance alone.

If scientific understanding is the objective, the scoring criteria need to emphasize scientific understanding. Artistic polish may be nice, but it should not quietly become the thing being assessed.

Projects Should Produce Evidence, Not Just Products

Projects can be excellent assessments, but a project is not automatically an assessment simply because students made something.

Ask yourself what evidence the finished product will give you.

Consider a history project in which students create a newspaper from a particular historical period. That could reveal quite a bit if students have to:

• identify important events,
• distinguish perspectives,
• explain causes and consequences,
• use evidence appropriately,
• and make historically defensible choices.

On the other hand, if most of the student’s time is spent selecting fonts, coloring headlines, and making the paper look old, the activity may be consuming far more time than the historical thinking justifies.

This is where a clear rubric or set of criteria helps. Students should know which parts of the work demonstrate the learning that matters most.

The same principle applies to presentations, posters, videos, models, demonstrations, and other open-ended products.

Interesting work and good assessment can overlap. They are not automatically the same thing.

Assessing Group Work Without Losing the Individual Student

Group work creates another assessment problem.

A successful group product proves that the group produced a successful product. It does not necessarily prove that every student in the group has the same level of understanding.

One student may have understood the concept deeply. Another may have been an excellent organizer. Another may have designed the slides. Another may have contributed relatively little.

Those are different things.

When individual understanding matters, include some individual evidence along with the group task. Guidance from Carnegie Mellon’s Eberly Center similarly recommends assessing individual learning and performance in addition to group output when appropriate.

That evidence does not have to involve another major assignment. Students might:

• answer an individual follow-up question,
• explain one part of the group’s reasoning,
• complete a short reflection,
• solve a related problem independently,
• respond to a brief quiz,
• or describe and defend a decision made by the group.

This allows teachers to use the benefits of collaboration without pretending that a single group grade tells the whole story.

Portfolios: Looking at Learning Over Time

Some learning is difficult to capture in a single moment.

Writing is an obvious example. One essay tells you something about a student’s writing. A collection containing early work, later work, revisions, feedback, and student reflections can tell you something different: how that writing developed.

Portfolios can be useful when growth, revision, or a body of work matters.

They may contain:

• selected student work
• drafts and revisions
• reflections
• teacher feedback
• performance records
• photographs or documentation of projects
• student-selected examples of improvement
• goals and evidence connected to those goals

Portfolios do have a weakness: they can become storage containers.

Saving 40 pieces of work does not automatically produce better assessment information than saving six carefully selected pieces.

Students and teachers should know why an item is included and what it helps demonstrate.

A smaller portfolio that clearly shows development is usually more useful than a stuffed folder nobody wants to open.

Self-Assessment

Students can also participate in assessing their own learning.

That does not have to mean asking, “What grade do you think you deserve?”

A more useful self-assessment asks students to compare their work or understanding against clear criteria.

For example:

• Which part of this rubric is strongest in your work?
• Where do you see evidence of that?
• Which criterion still needs work?
• What mistake do you understand now that you did not understand before?
• Which problem could you explain confidently to someone else?
• What is your next step?

Self-assessment can help make learning criteria more visible to students.

It can also reveal something teachers might otherwise miss. A correct answer does not always mean a student feels secure with a skill, and an incorrect answer does not always mean the student has no idea what is happening.

Students’ judgments will not always be accurate. That is another reason self-assessment works best as one source of information rather than the only source.

Peer Assessment and Peer Feedback

Peer review can be useful, particularly when students are working with clear examples and criteria.

But “Trade papers with the person next to you and tell them what you think” is not much of an assessment strategy.

Students need to know what they are looking for.

A useful peer-review task might ask students to identify:

• the claim in an argument,
• one piece of evidence supporting it,
• a place where reasoning is unclear,
• whether required elements are present,
• or one specific revision that would improve the work.

This also changes the intellectual work being done by the student giving the feedback. To evaluate a peer’s work against criteria, a student has to think about those criteria.

Peer feedback should still be used thoughtfully. Students may misunderstand criteria, hesitate to criticize friends, or focus on surface features because those are easiest to notice. Teacher judgment does not disappear simply because students are involved in assessment.

Give Students More Than One Way to Show Learning—Without Learning-Style Labels

Students differ.

They come to a lesson with different background knowledge, language experience, confidence, interests, strengths, disabilities, misconceptions, and previous opportunities to learn.

That is reason enough to think carefully about how students are asked to demonstrate learning.

We do not need to divide them into “visual learners,” “auditory learners,” and “kinesthetic learners” to do it. Although students can certainly have preferences, research does not support the claim that students learn better when teaching is matched to a fixed visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learning style.

It is more useful to ask whether the assessment format introduces an obstacle that is unrelated to the learning goal.

Suppose the goal is to assess a student’s understanding of the causes of a historical event. Does that understanding absolutely need to be demonstrated through a polished oral presentation?

Maybe. If speaking is one of the intended skills, it matters.

But if speaking is not part of what you are assessing, allowing an appropriate written or recorded explanation may sometimes give you better evidence of the history knowledge itself.

The key word is appropriate.

Choice should not remove the important thinking from the task. If the objective is writing an argument, students eventually have to write an argument. If the objective is oral communication, avoiding oral communication defeats the purpose.

Variety is useful when it improves access to the intended learning—not when it changes what students were supposed to learn.

Use Clear Criteria for Open-Ended Assessments

Traditional test questions often have relatively obvious scoring rules. Open-ended assessments usually do not.

What makes a presentation excellent?

What distinguishes a strong investigation from a weak one?

What matters most in a model?

What counts as a successful written explanation?

If teachers have not answered those questions before students begin, grading can drift toward whatever catches the eye.

A rubric, checklist, set of success criteria, or collection of examples can help.

The criteria do not always need to be enormous. In fact, a rubric with 17 categories can create its own problems.

Sometimes three or four priorities are enough.

For an explanatory science response, for example, the important criteria might be:

1. Is the scientific idea accurate?
2. Does the student use relevant evidence?
3. Does the explanation connect the evidence to the conclusion?
4. Is the reasoning understandable?

Those criteria tell students what matters and help the teacher remain focused on the intended learning.

Common Problems With Alternative Assessment

Alternative assessment solves some problems and creates others.

A few are worth watching for.

The assessment becomes too large

Not every learning goal needs a project.

If a three-minute task provides the evidence you need, there is no prize for turning it into a three-week task.

Presentation quality overwhelms content

Attractive slides, neat handwriting, expensive materials, sophisticated video editing, artistic skill, or an especially polished model can make work look impressive without necessarily demonstrating greater understanding.

Grade what you intended to assess.

The task measures too many unrelated skills

If students are being assessed on science understanding, research ability, group cooperation, public speaking, graphic design, writing mechanics, and technology use simultaneously, interpreting the final score becomes difficult.

Decide which skills actually matter for this assessment.

Only the finished product is assessed

Sometimes the most useful evidence appears during the process.

Planning notes, drafts, explanations, conferences, observations, revisions, and intermediate decisions can tell you things the polished final product cannot.

Longer projects and portfolios also require students to plan backward, break work into steps, and monitor progress. If those organizational decisions are part of the learning, teach them explicitly; this guide to study skills and time management provides a practical sequence.

Teachers collect information but never use it

This is especially easy with formative assessment.

There is little value in generating endless exit slips, trackers, color-coded charts, and student reflections if none of that information changes what happens next.

Collect the evidence you can actually use.

Choosing the Right Assessment

There is no single best assessment method.

A simple way to choose is to work backward from the evidence you need.

I need to know whether students remember essential information.
Try a short quiz, retrieval questions, or quick written response.

I need to know how students are thinking.
Ask for an explanation, use targeted questioning, have students compare strategies, or examine their work process.

I need to know whether students can apply the learning.
Use a problem, case, investigation, performance, or realistic task.

I need to know whether students can perform a skill.
Observe the performance and use clear criteria.

I need to know how students have grown over time.
Consider a portfolio, collection of work, repeated performance, or comparison of earlier and later work.

I need information today so I can decide what to teach tomorrow.
Keep it small: an exit ticket, a few questions, a quick problem, a student explanation, or another short formative check may be enough.

Assessment does not become better simply because it is more creative.

Sometimes a project is right.

Sometimes a conversation is right.

Sometimes students should demonstrate something.

And sometimes the humble five-question quiz wins.

The Goal Is Better Evidence of Learning

Going beyond tests does not mean abandoning tests.

It means recognizing that no single assessment format can show us everything students know, understand, and can do.

The assessment should fit the learning.

Teachers need enough evidence to recognize misunderstandings, judge progress, provide useful feedback, adjust instruction when necessary, and determine whether students can actually do the things we intended them to learn.

Sometimes that evidence comes from a test.

Sometimes it comes from watching a student work through a problem, listening to an explanation, examining several months of writing, observing a performance, or reading a two-sentence exit ticket.

The method matters.

But the more important question is always the same:

What does this assessment actually tell me about the student’s learning?