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LIMINAL ASSESSMENTS

This term was created to define a certain type of student assessment to make discussion on student assessment easier.

"Liminal Assessments" are performance assessments (not objective, multiple choice tests) that measure a student’s ability to use mental processing skills that are difficult or impossible to observe, such as reading comprehension, thinking skills, and cognitive processing. A Liminal Assessment requires the student to follow a disciplined or prescribed process for the creation of an assessable product or performance. The student’s competence at operating the prescribed process and the resulting product or performance is scored using a developmental performance rubric. This physical evidence is assumed to indicate a student’s competence at operating the required skill.

For example, a Liminal Assessment can be used for measure reading comprehension or proficient analysis. It requires that the student read a document, which is rated at a certain level of difficulty or sophistication. Then the student uses prescribed process strategies to create physical evidence of comprehension, such as a specific type of concept map. Then the student may be required to combine the products of smaller strategies into a larger, more comprehensive process. By completing all the steps, the student produces a product such as a prescribed by a Cornell Notes format. The final product is assumed to be good evidence that the student can comprehend the reading and is scored according to how well he or she followed the steps for each required process. It is assumed that if the student can produce the product correctly, then the student can be judged to have comprehended the reading.

All Liminal Assessments combine teacher instructional routines, the student strategies, and performance assessment. Therefore, each liminal assessment has these characteristics in common:

1. Each offers an instructional method(s) for teaching students how to follow procedures for a purpose.

2. Each requires a strategy or process that a student can use to prepare a product or performance;

3. Each of processes and strategies is useful and transferable so the student can function in similar situations other than the immediate task or course.

4. Each measures student competence by scoring the student-created product or observable performance as a tangible measure of the required skills.

Validity increases when the formative-summative process is implemented within a rigorous subject discipline so that teachers can expertly judge the value of their students’ thinking as it relates to the course content. Validity increases when teacher teams evaluate content validity and produce uniform measures which are routinely analyzed.

Reliability can be improved by teacher teams which use the assessment process uniformly. These teams should, first, establish inter-rater reliability and then analyze assessment results in comparison to other measures. The term “Liminal Assessments” was first used by Empowered High Schools, which uses liminal assessments as both formative measures during instructional practice and as summative assessment measures for benchmarking student progress towards mastery.

References

This work is being conducted by Howard McMackin, Ph.D. and his associates within high schools working with Empowered High Schools. Joseph Greene, at Rolling Meadows High School, is a leader for implementation and improvement of Liminal Assessments.

http://www.empoweredhighschools.com/