Equipped for the Future Assessment Report: How Instructors Can ...

E Q U I P P E D F O R T H E F U T U R E A S S E S S M E N T R E P O R T
Preface
EARLIER THIS YEAR THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE
for Literacy (NIFL) published Equipped
for the Future Content Standards:
What Adults Need to Know and be Able
to Do in the 21st Century. Based on six years of fieldbased
research efforts, the Equipped for the Future
Content Standards provide a new definition of adult
literacy and lifelong learning, one that accurately
reflects the full range of skills and knowledge that
enable adults to carry out their responsibilities as
parents and family members, citizens and community
members, and workers.
Work on an assessment framework for these
standards is underway and will be completed in
2002. In the meantime, however, programs using
the EFF Framework and Standards to guide curriculum
and instruction have asked for assistance in
developing assessment tools that will enable them to
measure progress on these new standards. This
paper is a first step in providing such guidance.
Written by Dr. Sri Ananda, an assessment specialist
who has been providing technical assistance
to the EFF development team, this paper describes
an important development in the educational
arena—the use of performance-based assessments
as part of a comprehensive system aimed at measuring
student performance relative to challenging content
and performance standards. The paper
provides an orientation to the key characteristics of
effective performance-based assessments, so that
instructors already using EFF Standards can understand
how performance-based assessment tools can
be used to measure progress relative to these standards.
Work has already begun on a handbook that
will assist instructors in applying the guidelines
presented here to the development of EFF assessment
tasks geared to the standards and dimensions
of performance. Based on ongoing work in EFF field
development sites, the handbook should be available
by January, 2001.
The author of this paper, Sri Ananda, is an educational
researcher and assessment specialist with a
broad range of experience on assessment-related
issues and practices. Dr. Ananda is co-director of the
Assessment and Standards Development Services
program at WestEd, the educational research and
development organization that has been designated
by the U.S. Department of Education as the “Assessment
Specialty Regional Laboratory.” In this capacity,
Dr. Ananda directs several high-profile standards
and assessment projects at the national, state, and
local levels.
This paper is based on years of work on performance-based
assessment by the author and her
colleagues at WestEd. The author also wishes to
acknowledge the helpful comments on earlier
drafts provided by Sondra Stein, Peggy McGuire,
and Joan Wills.
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