Criteria Referenced Assessment Steps

1. Identify a standard or other general description of what students are to know that will be assessed.
2. Identify facts, concepts, generalizations, skills, process, and/or attitudes needed to understand what is characterized by the standard or other description of what students are to know.
3. Identify problems, questions, tasks, or activities that students can perform that could provide useable information to infer students understanding of the concepts or generalizations; their attitudes related to the topics, concepts, and/ or generalizations; their skill or ability to perform necessary or identified skills; and their abilities to use inquiry and selected investigative processes.
4. Describe what students can be expected to communicate and/ or do if they are to successfully complete the identified problems, questions, tasks, and/ or activities.
5. Select one or more problems, questions, tasks, or activities that can be used to initiate student’s performance of the selected task that will provide assessment data to indicate their understanding, attitude, and/ or skills in the identified areas.
6. Create the assessment problems, questions, tasks, or activities, as they will be presented to students.
7. Create and write all administration guidelines that are necessary to engage students in the assessment task so that they might be successful in completing it.
8. Review the needs for all students’ that will be assessed to identify all accommodations for special needs and provide for those accommodations.
9. Identify what kinds of responses students might have for each item for different levels of understanding or skill. Describe what those different ways of understanding or skill might be seen in an artifact created by a student or viewed when performed by a student.
10. Order the different descriptions and select or modify them to create a scoring guide or rubric.
11. Describe how the CRA rubric will be checked for quality.
12. Describe how to check the assessment items can be checked for bias so that no one will be offended or unfairly penalized.
13. Pilot assessment task/tool to see how it works with students.