When I first began teaching, I was passionate about performance-based assessment, and the first groups of students that I taught found themselves engaged in upwards of ten different performance-based assessments each year. My seniors wrote I-Search reports ala Ken Macrorie, and when I taught eighth grade, my students were performing everything from the meaning of their vocabulary words to the scripts that they wrote as a part of their Cast of Characters projects. These were good times, and I learned an awful lot from the veteran teachers that I worked with about developing quality rubrics and helping kids attend to the finer details of their work, reinforcing the expectation that project-work was not mere fluff.

I still favor performance-based assessments over all others, but what I’ve come to realize is that this is something of a shortcoming. Recently, I had the opportunity to watch Rick Stiggins in action, and as he spoke about aligning assessment types to instructional targets, I found myself having (for lack of better phraseology) an AH HA moment. Stiggins presented the table below to the educators in his audience, and suddenly, I felt as if a missing piece were sliding into place for me.

Performance-based assessment is not always the most appropriate measure of assessment, and while I used to assume that comprehension was inherently necessary in order to complete a performance-based assessment successfully, I know now that this isn’t true. Sometimes, there are more appropriate measures…it simply depends upon what you are measuring.

All of this has me thinking today.

I’m thinking about the assessments on this chart, and I’m wondering where a blog entry might fit as an assessment tool. I’m wondering where we would place a wiki. Can Twitter be used as a means of formative assessment? I think it can. I think that most web 2.0 tools can be used to inspire formative assessment. They need a place on this map….what do you think? Are they a new assessment type, or do they fit into one of the categories already distinguished here? I know what I’m thinking, but perhaps we could invite others to the table to have this conversation.

What would happen if we spoke with kids about formative assessment? What would happen if we were direct about its purposes, if we told kids why were studying certain skills formatively, and if we invited them to share their thoughts and ideas about what might work best with us?

Maybe “getting ready for the test” can look like a blog entry. Maybe we can do it in MySpace. Maybe we can keep kids engaged while moving through our agenda as educators. Maybe we CAN do it all.