Beyond Basic Skills: The Role of Performance Assessment in Achieving 21st Century Standards of Learning

This report outlines the findings of a SCOPE series on student performance assessment. The series includes seven other commissioned papers examining what has been learned over several decades about the use of performance assessments for measuring higher-order thinking and performance skills. Focusing on large-scale systems, this series addresses technical advances, practices in the United States and abroad, feasibility and implementation issues, policy implications, uses with English language learners, and costs of performance assessments.