As Cheryl Almeida says in the Connected Learning Communities Toolkit, “the acid test of community-connected learning, or any other education reform, is student performance.” The key, however, is to look at what kind of performance we value—what kind of performance will lead to students’ future success as thoughtful, productive, creative citizens.

The term assessment is derived from a Latin word meaning "to sit beside, assist in the office of a judge," pointed out Chris Lake, Patricia Harmes, Diane Guill, Cathy Crist in their Coalition for Essential Schools 1998 Fall Forum workshop. “The assessor and the student often times sit together during assessment. Effective instruction throughout history has involved this characterization of assessment. It only seems new in comparison to the recent past, which involved the almost-exclusive use of standardized testing and multiple-choice tests. What is new is the clarity of the characterization, which can be credited to criticism of the assessment practices of the recent past and to advances in cognitive science and knowledge about learning.”

Students should have the opportunity to demonstrate the full range of their learning and to demonstrate their learning in multiple ways. These may include norm-referenced standardized tests, criterion-referenced tests, written and oral presentations, and portfolios. Whereas multiple-choice tests may measure discrete knowledge, only authentic assessment can evaluate authentic learning.

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