4 Quality Standards for Performance Assessments | Performance Assessments for Adult Education: Exploring the Measurement Issues: Report of a Workshop |The National Academies Press

poses, two of which—accountability and instruction—are particularly relevant to this report. As noted by several participants at the workshop, these two purposes are not always compatible, as they are concerned with different kinds of decisions and with collecting different kinds of information. Assessments for classroom instructional purposes are typically low stakes, that is, the decisions to be made are not major life-changing ones, relatively small numbers of individuals are involved, and incorrect decisions can be fairly easily corrected. Assessments for accountability, on the other hand, are usually high stakes: The viability of programs that affect large numbers of people may be at stake, resources are allocated on the basis of performance outcomes, and incorrect decisions regarding these resource allocations may take considerable time and effort to reverse—if, in fact, they can be reversed.

Assessment for instructional purposes is designed to facilitate instructional decisions, but instructional decision making is not the primary focus of assessments for accountability purposes. Assessments for instructional purposes may also include tasks that focus on what is meaningful to the teacher and the school or district administrator. But these particular tasks are not generally useful to external evaluators who want to make comparisons across districts or state programs. Hence, there is a trade-off in the kinds of information that can be gleaned from assessments for instructional purposes and assessments for accountability purposes. Assessments that are designed for instructional purposes need to be adaptable within programs and across distinct time points, while assessments for accountability purposes need to be comparable across programs or states.

Assessments for these two purposes also differ in the unit of analysis. When assessments are to be used for instructional purposes, the individual student is typically the unit of analysis. The resulting reported scores need to be sensitive to relatively small increments in individual achievement and to individual differences among students. For the purpose of accountability, the primary unit of analysis is likely to be larger (the class, the program, or the state). Assessments designed for this purpose need to be sensitive, not to individual differences among students but to differences in aggregate student achievement across groups of students (as measured by average achievement or by percentages of students scoring above some level). Because of these differences, the ways in which the quality standards apply to instructional and accountability assessments also differ.

While classroom instructional assessment is important in adult literacy programs, the primary concern of this workshop was with the development