Engaging students in meaningful applications of their knowledge is a key aspect of both addressing the standards and providing greater access. Not only do the standards emphasize the importance of meaningful engagement in real-world tasks, but evidence shows that engagement is strongly related to student performance on assessment tasks, especially for students who have been typically less advantaged in school settings.
Innovative assessment designs such as performance tasks offer a ripe opportunity to develop tasks that engage all students of diverse backgrounds. Performance Tasks provide opportunities for ‘leveling the playing field’ allowing students to demonstrate their evaluation, synthesis, analysis and application skills in more open-ended ways than multiple-choice items offer.
The goal of this student engagement toolkit for item writers and task reviewers is to introduce the ways in which dimensions of engagement may be meaningfully incorporated into assessment tasks so that all students are more fully motivated to complete the tasks and perform them well.
Key authors include Kari Kokka of the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) and Soung Bae of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE).
