Abstract
The United States has an opportunity to create a new generation of assessments that build on No Child Left Behind Act's (NCLB) strengths, including its commitment to accountability for the education of traditionally underserved groups of students. New assessments rely more heavily on the tasks requiring students to craft their own responses to complex problems. The challenges associated with using performance measures on a large scale include the need to ensure the tests' rigor and technical reliability, and to manage their cost and time requirements. The experiences of high‐achieving nations that use large‐scale performance assessments effectively illustrate how such assessments can be reliably and cost‐effectively incorporated into testing systems. To ensure that new assessments are developed to fully represent the new standards, federal and state policy should, among other things, fund an intensive development effort that enables states to develop, validate, and test high‐quality performance assessments.