Designing Online Performance Assessments: a Constructivist View

Constructivist learning theory already forms the base for many articles and other resources that help faculty design and build online courses. However, faculty have little to go on when it comes time to design and build performance assessments that fit the constructivist approach. There are many good reasons for this dearth of literature and other resources. First, using constructivist learning theories to generate guidelines for online performance assessment is not a straightforward exercise. While there are strong linkages between theory and practice when it comes to building multiple choice exams, little exists to guide performance task development. Second, psychometric (measurement-related) theory is not much help either. Measurement experts enjoy strong theory to practice linkages for objective exams, and these are in turn linked to learning theory. Yet there is still much in the way of disagreement in the measurement world about performance task assessment. Thus, faculty are left with little to go on except perhaps intuition and subjective experience. The author has spent the past 15 years developing linkages between constructivist learning theory and successful performance assessment. These linkages traverse the gaps between existing constructivist learning theory, psychometric theory, tenets of successful performance assessment—and most important—a set of real-world guidelines that faculty can use to build successful performance assessments. In this session, we will discuss how constructivist learning theory can inform performance assessment design. First, we will present concepts showing how the constructivist perspective fits as a framework for performance assessment. This will be followed by a brief discussion of interrelated constructivist learning theories and how the tenets of those theories inform assessment design by making connections between the theory and specific practices. We will spend the majority of the session presenting real-world guidelines with examples for designing and building solid performance assessments.