How will you know WHEN your learners have learned?

Performance Assessment Tasks and Scoring Guides

Competency-based learning design relies on performance or demonstration of the application of skills, knowledge, and attitudes. Competencies provide a good start in communicating performance expectations to your learners. They tell your learners WHAT they will be learning. But, even well written outcomes can leave room for confusion or misunderstanding about the expected performance. 

Performance standards, which include both assessment strategies and criteria, provide tools for clarifying performance expectations and set the stage for performance assessment tasks. Performance assessment tasks are specific tasks or assignments designed to measured outcomes such as competencies or program outcomes. They can be measurable products or observable processes.

Teachers evaluate performance consistently, accurately, and fairly because well-develop performance criteria are defined in an assessment task's scoring rubric or checklist. When students successfully master the performance criteria for a targeted learning outcome, they have shown or demonstrated evidence of learning.

Since 1994 WIDS Software and Consulting has advocated the Big 4 -- Who is my learner? What will my learner be able to do? When will my learner know he has learned a skills, knowledge, or attitude? How will my learner learn all that is necessary? Today, faculty still ask those same simple questions. Using the WIDS Instructional Design model and tool helps answer them!