As instructors using authentic learning strategies and performance-based assessment, you will want to ensure that students are learning in all disciplines and in all domains, and that the students’ presentations reflect this. Simply having the students do a presentation is not enough. The following are some tools to help you assess this.

• Assessing the achievement of discipline-specific knowledge

Student projects should be assessed against the high standards in each discipline that is featured in the integrated curriculum or project.

• Assessing Career-Technical competence

This is achieved through technical assessment. To order a comprehensive career-technical rubric.

• Assessing the achievement of cross-cutting functional skills and “habits of mind”

The Connected Learning Communities Toolkit provides a number of tools to assess student learning in these areas.

The “Habits of Mind” rubric from the Coalition for Essential Schools (page 45) assesses how student work demonstrates Perspective, Evidence, Relevance, Connection and Supposition

The "Massachusetts Work-Based Learning Plan", described on pages 72-76, is used in the State of Massachusetts in the context of work-based learning, to ensure that student learning at the worksite contributes to the development of both academic and “SCANS” competencies. It is administered to students, often by the employer in coordination with the instructor or work-based learning liaison, to assess skills early in the work-based learning experience and then toward the end of the experience.

The SCANS skills are posted here. In addition, practitioners have converted these into rubric format for use as assessment tools.

“Pathways to the World of Careers" developed by Irene Fujii at the Eden Area Regional Occupational Program

• Assessing students’ development of self- and career awareness

While self-awareness may be difficult to assess in any objective way, journals, portfolios, measures of emotional intelligence, and use of reflective exercises following job shadows and internships, assist counselors and teachers in seeing how students are relating their experiences to their own lives. Career awareness is easier to measure. This can be done by having students write about and present their learning at the end of any career-related experience. The Groundhog Job Shadow Day web site includes a downloadable toolkit for job shadowing. Pages 34-40 contain a variety of post-shadowing exercises, including the development of a “Personal Plan”. In one exercise students work in teams to describe specific things they learned about their worksite’s organizational structure and departmental operations. Earlier pages provided analytical tools for students to explore the workplace systematically.

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