Choosing the Right Assessment Tool

One thing I’ve learned after years in the classroom is that the format of an assessment matters just as much as the content. You can have a beautifully written learning target, but if the assessment tool doesn’t match what you’re trying to measure, you’ll end up with data that doesn’t actually help anyone.

I sometimes think about assessments like art supplies: I wouldn’t hand my students colored pencils if I wanted them to paint. And I wouldn’t hand them watercolors when what I really need is a crisp line drawing. The same is true of assessment—different tools serve different purposes.

Let’s break down the big three.

Selected-Response: Quick and Clear

Selected-response items (multiple choice, true/false, matching) get a bad reputation sometimes, but they have strengths:

• They’re efficient.

• They allow broad coverage of content.

• They’re easy to score consistently.

• They can be helpful when checking basic knowledge, vocabulary, or recall.

But they also have limits. Students can guess correctly, and it’s harder to assess reasoning or application. Selected-response formats tell me what students think—they don’t tell me why.

Open-Ended Responses: Show Me Your Thinking

Open-ended assessments—written responses, constructed answers, explanations—let me see inside a student’s thinking process.They’re great for:

• reasoning,

• explanation,

• elaboration,

• metacognition, and

• creativity.

These take longer to grade, and they require well-constructed rubrics. But when I really want to know what a student understands, open-ended tasks are often where the gold is. Open-ended assessments create deeper opportunities for students to express reasoning and demonstrate higher-order thinking, which aligns with research on effective formative assessment practices (Shatri & Zabeli, 2018).

Performance Tasks: Learning in the Real World

Performance assessments are where students do something with what they’ve learned—demonstrate a model, create a presentation, design a solution, perform a skill, build an artifact, act out a concept, or teach someone else.

I love performance tasks because they feel authentic to students. Research supports this approach too; VanWeelden and Heath-Reynolds (2019) argue that authentic assessments provide meaningful evidence of learning and can be designed to be accessible for students with a wide range of abilities.

Performance tasks are powerful when:

• You want deeper application

• You want real-world alignment

• You want to see strategy, not just answers

• You want to honor different learning strengths

So Which One Is “Best”?

Honestly? None of them—and all of them.

The “best” assessment is the one that matches:

1. your learning target,

2. your purpose, and

3. your students.

Sometimes a quick selected-response check is exactly what we need. Other times, an open-ended reflection shows me whether we’re truly ready to move on. And when we’re exploring science, engineering, or social studies, performance tasks often become the primary way students demonstrate understanding.

A balanced assessment system uses all three, just like a well-stocked art cabinet.

My Guiding Question

At the end of the day, here’s the question I always come back to:

“What is the best way for students to show me what they know right now?”

When I choose assessments with purpose and intention, the data is clearer, the learning is deeper, and my students feel more ownership of the process.

And that’s exactly what I want assessment to do.

References

Shatri, Z. G., & Zabeli, N. (2018). Perceptions of students and teachers about the forms and student self-assessment activities in the classroom during formative assessment. Journal of Social Studies Education Research, 9(2), 44–59.

VanWeelden, K., & Heath-Reynolds, J. (2019). Steps to designing authentic assessments for students with disabilities in music classes. Music Educators Journal, 105(3), 33–40.