Introduction
How the term “alternative assessment” is defined depends largely on what it is providing an alternative to. In the 1997 edition of this encyclopedia, which did not include a separate chapter on alternative assessment, McNamara observed that increasingly performance testing was viewed as a “feature of alternative assessment,” as part of “the move to base assessment not on multiple‐choice format tests but on actual instances of use by learners” (p. 132). As McNamara suggested, alternative assessment is most often contrasted with traditional testing (Gipps, 1999; Huerta‐Macías, 1995; Maslovaty and Kuzi, 2002; Shephard, 2000), specifically, single event, discrete‐point, multiple‐choice tests that result in numerical scores and the ranking of individuals.
However, as Birenbaum ( 1996) points out, alternative assessment has become the “most generic term currently used in the assessment literature” (p. 3)—an umbrella term applied not only to performance testing, but also to...
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Fox, J. (2008). Alternative Assessment. In: Hornberger, N.H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30424-3_170
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