New educational reforms calling for challenging standards that emphasize real world problem solving skills have caused a paradigm shift in assessment to more authentic forms that support measurement of these skills. Within the authentic assessment movement, an important thrust is performance assessment; namely assessment based on students performing realistic tasks. This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project from Research Development Corporation seeks to develop an automated system for presenting and scoring performance tasks. The system will use artificial intelligence as a means to make scoring more timely, cost effective, and reliable. Research Development Corporation proposes that the problems of labor intensiveness, costs, and inconsistencies across an inherently subjective rating process in scoring large scale assessments can be addressed by creating performance tasks within a simulated problem environment and using intelligent tutoring system and assessment technologies to automatically assess the students. Specifically, the project will generate an automated performance assessment system for high school science using simulated science experiments as performance tasks, and it will evaluate the reliability of the technology by comparing ratings made by the technology to ratings made by trained teachers using the same scoring rubrics. Research Development Corporation proposes an innovative automated tool for the rapid assessment of students that has potential for a significant impact on student assessment, the learning process, and on the way science is taught. Being able to easily measure gains in the applications and synthesis of knowledge is crucial to promoting the value of higher level thinking and application of content in our Nation's schools.
