THE WORK SAMPLING SYSTEM - RELIABILITY AND VALIDITY OF A PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT FOR YOUNG-CHILDREN

Performance assessment, an alternative approach to assessing students' achievements in school, refers to assessment methods that allow stude nts to demonstrate their skills, knowledge, behavior, and accomplishme nts across a wide variety of classroom domains on multiple occasions. This article presents data concerning the reliability and validity of the Work Sampling System with 100 kindergarten-age children. A psychom etric design was implemented in which children were enrolled in classr ooms where the Work Sampling System was used and were also given indiv idually-administered norm-referenced assessments in the fall and sprin g; in addition, their teachers completed a behavior rating scale in th e spring. Results show that the Work Sampling checklist and summary re port have very high internal and moderately high interrater reliabilit y. The Work Sampling System accurately predicts performance on the nor m-referenced achievement battery, even when the potential effects of g ender, maturation (age), and initial ability are controlled. These dat a provide empirical support for the reliability and criterion validity of this performance assessment system as a measure of children's over all school achievement in kindergarten. The discussion covers issues r aised by the study's design and by the use of performance assessment i n general.