There are two contrary current trends in educational assessment. One emphasizes standardized testing as primary, while the other is more process oriented. The former is often driven by political forces and parent concerns, while the latter is more often the focus of education professionals. The task is to bring these two strands together to create an effective assessment program within the school and district.
The trend during the 1990s has been away from standardized multiple choice testing and toward performance assessment, which includes performance, portfolios, and products assessments. According to Madaus and O'Dwyer (1999), this represents a break from the past, but not necessarily one that has yet been fully realized. According to them, the general trend in educational assessment has been toward increasing efficiency in the system and making the system standardized, easily administered, objective, reliable, comparable, and inexpensive. The past decade has seen a change toward more qualitative, less standardized, less objective, and less comparable measures. Both shape the school and influence teachers, administrators, and students, in different ways. Problems result when the different types of assessments are used inappropriately.
For example, the focus on constructionism in teaching and learning, along with collaborative teaching and learning, is more congruent with qualitative, rather than quantitative, assessment processes. These include portfolio use for students, with teachers working individually or as teams in order to reflect upon, and assess, those portfolios (Allen, 1998).
Allen (1998) noted that portfolio assessment, which is fundamental to constructionist education, is not often fully developed as a collaborative methodology, however. Elements of the old are retained along with the new. The individual teacher is still seen as the source of the grade for the student, and as the sole individual...