 One of the main transformations over the past 15 years is the enlarged encouragement or real use of option subjective approaches for the formal evaluation of students. One of the main transformations over the past 15 years is the enlarged encouragement or real use of option subjective approaches for the formal evaluation of student aptitude or accomplishment. Two main categories of these alternative evaluation approaches have come out:
• Authentic or performance evaluation
• Portfolio evaluation.
Advocates for these approaches have argued that these approaches are intrinsically better to objective multiple-choice testing.
The most important purpose of authentic performance evaluation is to evaluate the capability of applying knowledge to resolve real-life problems. Baker, O'Neil, and Linn (1993) listed the following six characteristics of student’s performance evaluation:
1) Uses open-ended tasks;
2) Focuses on higher order skills;
3) Employs context sensitive strategies;
4) Often uses complex problems requiring several types of performance and important student time;
5) Consists of either individual or group performance;
6) May engage an important degree of student choice.
These kinds of evaluations, at least insofar as a wide-ranging description is concerned, approach the learner as more active. The student must take significant control over the estimation throughout planning and applying knowledge in maybe new and dissimilar ways. Advocates of these methods claim that they reach more compound cognitive skills as well.
Reckase (1995) described a portfolio as a purposeful collection of student work that exhibits to the student and others the student's attempts, progress, or accomplishment in a given area. This collection must comprise:
- student participation in selection of portfolio content,
- the criteria for selection,
- the criteria for judging merit,
- evidence of student self-reflection.
Portfolios, even more so than other forms of performance evaluation, call on the learner to be extremely engaged in planning the entries, choosing what to comprise, and providing the rationale behind those decisions. Portfolios thus try not only to evaluate the end products, but to some extent, the process that went into creating them too.
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