Assessing Student Project Work

roject work challenges students to think beyond the boundaries of the classroom, helping them develop the skills, behaviors, and confidence necessary for success in the 21st-century. Designing learning environments that help students question, analyze, evaluate, and extrapolate their plans, conclusions, and ideas, leading them to higher–order thinking, requires feedback and evaluation that goes beyond a letter or number grade. The term “authentic assessment” is used to describe assessment that evaluates content knowledge as well as additional skills like creativity, collaboration, problem-solving, and innovation.

Authentic assessment documents the learning that occurs during the project-building process and considers the real-world skills of collaboration, problem solving, decision making, and communication. Since project work requires students to apply knowledge and skills throughout the project-building process, you will have many opportunities to assess work quality, understanding, and participation from the moment students begin working.

For example, your evaluation can include tangible documents like the project vision, storyboard, and rough draft, verbal behaviors such as participation in group discussions and sharing of resources and ideas, and non-verbal cognitive tasks such as risk taking and evaluation of information. You can also capture snapshots of learning throughout the process by having students complete a project journal, a self-assessment, or by making a discussion of the process one component of the final presentation.