ABSTRACT
This chapter describes an effort to identify authentic student performances in elementary economics, to develop assessment tasks that elicit these performances, and explores a fair and reliable method of grading the assessments. It offers process-based suggestions for designing authentic performance assessments (PA) collaboratively with teachers, based on the experience of those involved in the project. In sum, the literature shows that mini-economies have the potential to elicit authentic intellectual work in economics, making them a prime context for the use of PAs. To summarize the project in broad strokes, a design team consisting of elementary classroom teachers and two university researchers created a series of authentic PAs that encouraged students to use economic thinking as they participated in a mini-economy. Two kinds of data were collected: students’ written responses to the PA prompts, and transcribed video footage of the small-group conversations that occurred as they engaged in the performance tasks.
