PARENTAL REACTIONS TO AUTHENTIC PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT1

This paper examines parents ’ reactions to the use of a curriculum-embedded performance assessment––the Work Sampling System (WSS)––with their kindergarten–third grade children. Of the 350 surveys distributed to this predominantly low-income, African American, inner-city population, 246 were completed and returned, yielding a return rate of 70%. The data were aggregated into subscales, and internal reliability measures, descriptive statistics, and two-step hierarchical regressions on each subscale were calculated. In order to examine the direct and indirect effect of parents ’ perceptions of teachers ’ willingness to use WSS and other factors on parents ’ overall satisfaction, structural equation modeling was used. Results demonstrate that parents in this study hold positive attitudes towards WSS and believe that WSS benefits their children. The majority of parents who returned the survey prefer WSS summary reports to conventional report cards and want their children to continue participating in classrooms that use WSS. Parents ’ perceptions of teachers ’ willingness to use WSS and staff availability to answer parents ’ questions about WSS strongly affect parents ’ attitudes towards WSS. The structural equation modeling shows that parents ’ attitudes towards 1 We acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Sandi Koebler of the University of Pittsburgh and Carolyn Burns of the University of Michigan in collecting and coding these data, Jac