Authentic Assessment in Action: Studies of Schools and Students at Work

Linda Darling-Hammond is the 2023 National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) Policy Leader of the Year

This book examines, through case studies of elementary and secondary schools, how five schools have developed “authentic” performance-based assessments of students’ learning, and how this work has interacted with and influenced the teaching and learning experiences students encounter in school. This important and timely book reveals the changing dynamics of classroom life as it moves from more traditional pedagogy to one that asks students to master intellectual and practical skills that are eminently transferable to “real-life” social settings and workplaces.

Selected chapters: Authentic Assessment in Action • Graduation by Portfolio at Central Park East Secondary School • The Senior Project at Hodgson Vocational Technical High School • Collaborative Learning and Assessment at International High School • The Primary Language Record at P.S. 261 • The Bronx New School: Weaving Assessment into the Fabric of Teaching and Learning • Making Assessment Work for Students and Schools

This book will be important reading for practitioners, professors, and researchers of curriculum and instruction and educational policy, and will serve as a supplementary text in pre- and in-service courses in elementary and secondary curriculum development, curriculum and teaching, school organizations, educational leadership, educational policy, and implementation.

“Some schools have ... reconnected learning, teaching, and assessment in powerful ways, ones which raise all sorts of central questions about education. What are high standards? Who decides what they are? How can one tell them when one sees them? To what extent do we care how our students perform in life beyond the classroom and testing room? ... It was five such schools that Linda Darling-Hammond and her colleagues have studied and which form the basis for this important book. The issue of assessment comes first, but we see in the following case studies how it becomes powerfully enveloped in the processes of learning and teaching, of informing students, teachers, parents, and others of ‘how the children are doing.’ The portraits explicitly and implicitly suggest a deep, fair, and defensible way to answer the question ‘How’m I doing?’ in a manner that helps this child and eventually every child.”
—From the Foreword by Theodore R. Sizer