Assessing Student Performance: Exploring the Purpose and Limits of Testing

Now in paperback!

"The most comprehensive and exhaustive treatise available on the imperative to change the ways we test and assess student performance...it will become a major reference work for supporters of student-centered assessment."

--Educational Leadership

"A 'must' book for the on-going debate on American school reform."

--Theodore R. Sizer, chairman, Coalition of Essential Schools

What is assessment and how does testing differ from it? Why are performance tests, by themselves, not an adequate system of student assessment? How might we better "test our tests" beyond current technical standards? And why won't increased national testing offer the accountability of schools we so sorely need? In Assessing Student Performance, Grant P. Wiggins explores these questions and clarifies the limits of testing in an assessment system. He analyzes problematic practices in test design and formats that prevent students from explaining their answers. By showing us that assessment is more than testing and intellectual performance is more than right answers, Wiggins leads us to new systems of assessment that more closely examine students' habits of mind and provide teachers and policy makers with more useful and credible feedback.

GRANT P. WIGGINS is the president and director of programs for the Center on Learning, Assessment, and School Structure (CLASS), a nonprofit educational research and consulting organization in Pennington, New Jersey.