performanceassessment

I’m a big advocate for, and user of, performance assessments (see The Best Resources For Learning About Performance Assessment).

Today, Stanford unveiled the free Performance Assessment Resource Bank, which is big news to anyone who wants to learn more about the strategy and/or enhance their use of it.

Here’s their announcement:

Today, UL-SCALE and SCOPE, research and practice centers at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education, announced the public launch of the Performance Assessment Resource Bank (PARB) — a free online resource for K-12 teachers, administrators, and policy makers. Educators across the US are facing the challenge of finding the high-quality resources needed to scale performance assessment.
 
That’s why we built the Performance Assessment Resource Bank  for K-12 teachers, administrators, and policy makers. This new Web site is designed to serve as a platform for sharing high-quality performance assessments and resources curated from educators and organizations nationwide and for building community among the educators and leaders who use, develop, and share these important tools.
 
The Web site, now in its nationwide rollout, features:

  • Free, open access.
  • A growing library of high quality performance tasks, portfolio frameworks, learning progressions, research, and other assessment resources, all developed by educators and organizations and vetted by experts trained by UL-SCALE at Stanford University.
  • Personalized dashboards with saved resources for each community member.
  • A user rating system to guide content selection and facilitate continuous improvement of content.
  • The ability for registered users to share resources via email, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

It looks like they have a nice collection of resources – they’re sure likely to be tons better than any assessment recommended by school District central offices. And many can be used in conjunction with units that most educators already teach. Having the imprimatur of Stanford (plus each assessment lists associated Common Core Standards) will help probably help teachers alleviate any administrators’ concerns.

Boy, when it comes to useful resources being generated by universities, I’m not sure anybody can beat Stanford these days. In addition to the Performance Assessment Resource Bank, here are just a few of their other associated projects:

PERTS, a super resource for Social Emotional Learning (see my posts Good Videos On A Growth Mindset, The Importance Of Learning From Mistakes & A Lot More and Three Useful Growth Mindset Resources).

Reading Like A Historian is an impressive collection of almost ninety U.S. and World History lessons from The Stanford History Education Group. It’s on The Best Places To Find Free (And Good) Lesson Plans On The Internet list.

Understanding Language is an important initiative to support English Language Learners.

And, of course, the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, one of the sponsors of the Performance Bank, is one of the most important resources in the United States for education policy research.